Looking for a Git Graph alternative?
Git Graph earned its 14M installs — but its last release was April 2021. Here's how Interactive Git Log compares as an actively maintained, workflow-first alternative.
Credit where it's due
Git Graph is a genuinely good extension: a clean, fast graph of your repository's entire history, with right-click actions for checkout, merge, rebase, cherry-pick, and more. Its 5-star rating across hundreds of reviews is deserved, and if all you want is to look at history, it still does that fine.
The catch: version 1.30.0 shipped in April 2021, and the project has accumulated hundreds of open issues since. VS Code has changed a lot in five years. Betting your daily workflow on an unmaintained extension is a real cost, even when the extension is good.
Viewer vs workflow tool
The deeper difference isn't maintenance — it's philosophy. Git Graph shows you everything and lets you act on it through context menus. IGL shows you your work — a smartlog tree starting where your branches diverge from main — and builds the workflow around it: staging and committing in the same panel, one-click rebase, a stack editor, and a conflict checklist when rebases get messy.
| Capability | Interactive Git Log | Git Graph |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Daily Git workflow | Repository history viewer |
| View scope | Your work since divergence from main | Entire repository history |
| Stage / commit / amend in the view | ✓ | Limited (stash & uncommitted view) |
| Visual stack editing (reorder / squash / drop) | ✓ Stack editor | — |
| Conflict checklist during rebase | ✓ | — |
| Branch actions | ✓ Hover buttons on the tree | ✓ Right-click menus |
| Last release | Actively maintained | April 2021 (v1.30.0) |
| Price | Free | Free |
The bottom line
If you mainly browse history, Git Graph still works. If Git is part of your minute-to-minute workflow — branching, rebasing, cleaning up commits — IGL replaces the terminal for all of it, and it's built and maintained in 2026, not 2021.
Frequently asked questions
Is Git Graph still maintained?
Its last release, v1.30.0, shipped in April 2021, and its issue tracker has hundreds of open issues. The extension still works for many people — but it hasn't evolved in years, and unfixed bugs are likely to stay that way.
Can IGL show the whole repository history like Git Graph?
That's not its goal. IGL deliberately shows a smartlog tree — your branches from where they diverge from origin/main — rather than every commit ever made. For day-to-day work, that focused view is the feature.
Do I lose anything switching from Git Graph?
Full-history browsing of the entire repository is the main thing Git Graph does that IGL doesn't aim to. You gain a live working-copy view with one-click staging, the stack editor, and the conflict checklist — none of which Git Graph has.