Cornerstone vs Versions for Mac OS X [closed]

Answer 1

Cornerstone doesn't do svn merges. For me that's a deal killer (merging revisions from a a branch into the trunk? nope).

If all you need to do is commit and browse and checkout, Cornerstone is sexy and awesome, I like the UI better than Versions.

For daily usage -- branching, tagging, merging -- I like SmartSVN best and it's cross platform. UI isn't as sexy.

Answer 2

I've tried both and like Cornerstone better, mainly because it has a far superior file-diff interface.

With Cornerstone, you can double-click on any file in your commit-list and it instantly brings up a diff of your version vs the repository version. This makes it very easy to quickly code-review your changes before checking in.

With Versions, as far as I can tell, you have to hit Ctrl-D, then hit Compare, and then wait a good few seconds before it loads up the diff tool.

Answer 3

Cornerstone has been out a few years and version 2 was just released. It is now by far the best value, fastest and feature rich Subversion client for the Mac. The merge features and annotations alone are awesome. I have never seen such a cool take on either of them and the way you can just click a block of text when comparing and have the log message displayed for that block together with all the statistical information you'll ever need in a stunning UI, it's just awesome.

Seriously I can't recommend this tool enough. It is in a different league to Versions.

Answer 4

I'd like to add Cornerstone 2 now has branch & merge, which is a real 1-up on Versions. Irritatingly I bought Versions just before that release so I feel a little stung :-(

Answer 5

After reading this and looking at CornerStone 2.0 and Versions, Corner Stone won on just the simplicity of their file compare.

With versions I have to download or install XCode (or something else). Cornerstone had it built in, and for my tastes the Cornerstones file compare is the best I've seen for a casual user. It's just immediately clear what was added and deleted.

I haven't tried the branch and merge but it seems Cornerstone has made that a big push.

Answer 6

We just bought 15 licenses of Cornerstone 2 after spending a few days evaluating it against the competing products included Versions. Save to say, Cornerstone 2 is in a different league to everything else. The entire application has been so well conceived it often boggles the mind. From browsing your working copy to awesome merge support, it just does not get any better. It's super fast and easy to use. Worth mentioning are the annotations as well, which make everything else the competition has done look dated and lame. Keep up the amazing work Zennaware.