GitLens
by GitKraken
The Git workbench where human and AI-agent changes get reviewed, composed and merged in one view
GitLens is GitKraken's Git extension for VS Code and AI-native forks such as Cursor and Windsurf, with over 40 million installs. Version 19, released August 2026, rebuilds the Commit Graph into a workbench where engineering teams track live coding-agent sessions, review generated changes, compose clean commits, automate rebases and resolve conflicts with AI, instead of reading agent output as an undifferentiated diff.
GitLens is a Git extension for VS Code, created by Eric Amodio in 2016 and acquired by GitKraken in October 2021, that has grown into the most widely installed Git tool in the editor with more than 40 million installs and roughly 9.9k GitHub stars. It is dual-licensed — MIT for most of the source, a separate proprietary licence for files under the plus directories — and runs in VS Code plus the AI-native forks Cursor, Windsurf, Trae and Kiro. The August 2026 release, GitLens 19.0, is the largest change in the extension's history and reframes the product around a specific problem: GitKraken's own 2026 State of AI in Engineering report found 96.4% of engineering organisations now use AI coding tools and 84% of developers report higher productivity, which pushes the bottleneck from writing code to understanding, reviewing and merging it. The Commit Graph was rebuilt on a new rendering engine with grouped columns, lane folding, a type-ahead reference finder, HEAD and upstream markers and a diffstat Changes column, and becomes the primary workspace rather than a history view. Around it, GitLens 19 adds live Claude Code agent-session status directly in the graph with resume-from-working-changes, AI-assisted review of generated changes, Compose for turning agent output into clean commits, AI-driven automatic rebase, and conflict resolution that consults the repository — reading files, blame history and search — while streaming progress, confidence indicators and its rationale. The release also brings full GitHub stacked pull request support with layer badging, a Pull Requests sidebar panel, SSH signature verification and a rebuilt settings experience with per-feature AI model selection.
An engineering leader whose developers have adopted coding agents and who now has a review-and-merge bottleneck rather than a code-production one.
Agent-generated work becomes visible, reviewable and mergeable inside the editor, in the same graph as human commits, instead of arriving as an opaque diff.
At a Glance
- Category
- Developer Tools
- Pricing
- Freemium, Subscription, Contact for pricing
- Target Market
- VPs of Engineering, Engineering Managers, Enterprise Developers, Platform Engineering Teams, CTOs
- Deployment
- Cloud-first, Self-hosted, Hybrid
- Founded
- 2000
- Headquarters
- Scottsdale, Arizona, United States
- Team Size
- 51-200
- Customers
- 40M+ GitLens installs; GitKraken reports over 10 million developers across more than 100,000 companies
Key Features
- ✓Commit Graph as development workbench
Rebuilt rendering engine with grouped columns, lane folding, type-ahead reference search, HEAD and upstream markers and a diffstat column, replacing history browsing with an actual working surface.
- ✓Live agent session tracking
Claude Code sessions appear in the graph with status indicators for working, idle or needs-input, and can be resumed directly from a working-changes row.
- ✓AI-assisted review and Compose
Reviews generated changes for meaningful findings and reorganises sprawling agent output into clean, logically separated commits before a pull request is opened.
- ✓AI automatic rebase and conflict resolution
Drives an end-to-end rebase and resolves conflicts by consulting repository files, blame history and search, streaming progress, confidence indicators and its rationale as it goes.
- ✓GitHub stacked pull requests
Full stacked-PR support with layer badging, a sidebar Pull Requests panel and detail sheets showing stack maps and merge options without leaving the editor.
- ✓Per-feature AI model selection
Each AI capability can be pointed at a different model, including Gemini 3.6 and 3.5 Flash, so teams control cost and data flow per workflow rather than globally.
- ✓Runs across AI-native editors
Supported in VS Code plus Cursor, Windsurf, Trae and Kiro, so one Git workflow survives a team splitting across different AI editors.
Capabilities
Use Cases
- •Supervising a fleet of coding agents
An engineering manager watches which agent sessions are working, idle or blocked across branches and worktrees from one graph instead of polling terminals.
- •Turning agent output into reviewable commits
A developer takes a large unstructured set of agent-generated changes and uses Compose to split it into logically separated commits with meaningful messages.
- •Pre-merge review of generated code
AI review surfaces meaningful findings in changes the developer did not write personally, before those changes reach a human reviewer in a pull request.
- •Untangling a long-lived feature branch
Automatic rebase prepares history and resolves conflicts with repository context, replacing an afternoon of manual conflict resolution against a fast-moving main branch.
- •Shipping stacked pull requests
A developer builds and merges a stack of dependent GitHub pull requests with layer badging and stack maps, without switching to the browser.
Ideal For
Best For
- ✓Teams running Claude Code or similar coding agents who need to see agent session status alongside branches and worktrees
- ✓Reviewing and reshaping AI-generated changes into clean, meaningful commits before they reach a pull request
- ✓Managing parallel development across many branches and worktrees from a single Git-aware surface
- ✓Automating rebases and resolving merge conflicts with AI that consults blame history and repository context
- ✓Working GitHub stacked pull requests without leaving the editor
- ✓Standardising Git tooling across VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Trae and Kiro in a mixed-editor organisation
Not Ideal For
- ✗Terminal-first developers who work in git, tig or lazygit and get no value from a GUI layer — a recurring criticism in third-party reviews
- ✗Individuals and small teams working on private repositories who balk at the freemium boundary: the Commit Graph on private repos, Visual File History, Worktrees, Launchpad and the AI features are all Pro-gated, which has driven a fork of v11.7.0 and paid third-party commit-graph alternatives
- ✗Organisations standardised on a non-VS-Code editor such as JetBrains IDEs, Neovim or Emacs, where GitLens does not run
- ✗Teams whose review process lives entirely in GitHub or GitLab's web UI, where the in-editor overlap may not justify per-seat cost
Deployment
Market & Ratings
40M+ GitLens installs; GitKraken reports over 10 million developers across more than 100,000 companies
Market Analysis
Pros
- ✓Enormous installed base and default status in VS Code, so adoption inside a team needs almost no change management
- ✓GitLens 19 addresses the real 2026 bottleneck — reviewing and merging agent-generated code — rather than adding another generation feature
- ✓Genuinely capable free tier covering blame, CodeLens, history navigation and public-repo Commit Graph
- ✓Works across VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Trae and Kiro, so a team splitting across AI editors keeps one Git workflow
- ✓Mostly MIT-licensed source on GitHub, so the non-premium behaviour is auditable
Cons
- ✗The freemium boundary is the recurring complaint: the private-repo Commit Graph and AI features are Pro-only, which prompted a community fork of v11.7.0 (GitLess) and paid third-party alternatives such as a $15 commit-graph replacement posted to Hacker News
- ✗Hacker News has criticised the upsell mechanics directly since the v12 premium launch, in a thread titled 'GitLens adds Premium Features and enough reminders that you don't miss them'
- ✗Third-party reviewers note free alternatives cover much of the ground — Git Graph for VS Code for visualisation, Sourcetree for private-repo GUI access — which weakens the Pro case for individuals
- ✗Terminal-first developers get little from it, a limitation reviewers repeat and GitKraken does not dispute
- ✗Seat caps rather than pure price tiers force plan migrations as a team grows past 2, 10 or 100 seats
- ✗GitKraken does not publish SOC 2 or ISO 27001 evidence on its pricing or product pages; only Enterprise lists security audit logs, so security review requires a sales conversation
Pricing
Community
$0
- ✓Blame annotations, CodeLens, file annotations and revision navigation
- ✓Commit Graph, Worktrees and Visual History on public repos with a free account
- ✓Automatic Rebase and stacked PR support
- ✓1,000,000 AI credits per week
- ✓Local repos and public remotes only
Pro
Per seat per month, billed annually (max 2 seats)
- ✓Commit Graph and Visual File History on private repos
- ✓Worktrees, Launchpad, Cloud Patches and Code Suggest
- ✓Jira, Linear and Azure DevOps issue integrations
- ✓GitKraken MCP access and AI commit messages
- ✓1,000,000 AI credits per week
Advanced
Per seat per month, billed annually (max 10 seats)
- ✓Self-hosted Git integrations
- ✓Pull Request Automations and auto-compose commits
- ✓Single-domain SSO
- ✓2,000,000 AI credits per week
- ✓1 business day support
Business
Per seat per month, billed annually (max 100 seats)
- ✓Multi-domain SSO
- ✓GitKraken Insights
- ✓Customer success manager
- ✓3,000,000 AI credits per week
- ✓12-hour support response
Enterprise
Contact for pricing
- ✓Custom terms, 20+ seat minimum
- ✓Security audit logs
- ✓All AI models supported
- ✓4,000,000 AI credits per week
- ✓6-hour support response and dedicated support
GitLens is freemium and per-seat, billed annually, with a 14-day Pro trial that needs no credit card. The Community tier is genuinely usable — blame, CodeLens, revision navigation, and the Commit Graph on public repos — but the private-repo Commit Graph, Visual File History, Worktrees, Launchpad and the AI features are all Pro-gated, which is the single most common complaint about the product. Tiers are also seat-capped rather than purely price-differentiated: Pro stops at 2 seats, Advanced at 10, Business at 100, and Enterprise starts at 20 with custom terms. AI is metered separately as weekly AI credits per user, rising from 1M on Community and Pro to 4M on Enterprise. GitKraken's pricing page renders its dollar figures client-side and did not expose them to our fetch, and third-party trackers disagree substantially — quoting anywhere from $4.95 to $14.50 per seat per month — so treat any published figure other than GitKraken's own checkout as unverified.
Security & Compliance
Connect
Sources
This page was written from 9 sources, 6 on domains other than gitkraken.com.
- 1.gitkraken.com — gitlensvendor
- 2.gitkraken.com — gitlens 19 the commit graph reimagined for parallel developmvendor
- 3.help.gitkraken.com — gitlens release notes current
- 4.gitkraken.com — pricingvendor
- 5.github.com — vscode gitlens
- 6.finance.yahoo.com — gitkraken introduces gitlens 19 bringing 120400928
- 7.hn.algolia.com — hn.algolia.com
- 8.thesoftwarescout.com — gitkraken pricing 2026 plans costs is it really worth it
- 9.prnewswire.com — gitlens for visual studio code and its creator eric amodio j
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