Cornerstone App Reviews

Ive been using Versions since it came out and its always been a great client for Subversion when I have to use Subversion. That said, its missing some pretty major features, like merging, that make Cornerstone really stand out. This app has all the bells and whistles and is easy to get up and going with. I was hesitant to spend the $60.00 knowing that I wont be using Subversion for too much longer but I can tell you it was worth it. Very well made app that is functional and usable and Im not stuck waiting for them to implement a feature that I need, its all here. Trust me, this is the Cadillac of Subversion clients.

It took me a long time to find a suitable Subversion client for the Mac. What really sold me initially was its look and feel. Its way more feature rich than Versions, but also has the same elegance and simplicity of a native Mac app. It also has a tremendously powerful built-in diff viewer and merging tool which has become essential when working with larger projects. Also, when working with large teams, being able to view diffs during a commit in order to write details logs has proven to be a huge time saver. Its always been difficult to have to navigate back and forth before committing your changes. If youre on the fence about a SVN app, this is definitely the app to go for.

If you need an SVN client that has full support for all SVN features like branching and merging, sparse checkouts, blame, etc, this is the client you want. I miss very little coming from Windows to the Mac, but I have missed TortoiseSVN, until I found Cornerstone 2. Id actually played with Cornerstone v1 and found it lacking, but 2 is revamped and, well, excellent. I highly recommend to anyone who has demanding SVN needs. (I should note, there are other UI SVN clients that are easier to understand if you dont need all the features Cornerstone offers... this app is fairly "technical" in how it maps to SVN functionality.)

I work for a software development company where we use Subversion everyday to manage multiple projects. This tool is a must have for anyone who uses Subversion to its full potential. Most of my coworkers are on Windows machines using TortoiseSVN and they are constantly asking me complete merges and comparisons which are tedious in their environment (people are seriously considering switching to the Mac for THIS application). Not only is Cornerstone amazing as is, but I have already received great tech support. I wanted to associate custom extensions with Cornerstone to utilize the built-in syntax highlighting (which, is great by the way) but that is not currently a feature. Well, Zennaware emailed me back with a solution, that while technically not supported, was incredibly simple to implement, and I am very happy! Honestly, this has to be my favorite software purchase of the year and optimizes the great software only available on a Mac. Incredible!

Ive been disappointed in most SVN clients. I did use Versions for a while but when I found out about Cornerstone and read the reviews I figured I would try it. Cornerstone rocks. I love it, especially because it makes the difficult things easy. Its worth the price.

I tried versions for a bit and it stunk, clunky interface and terrible user experience in my opinion. Only thing I would like to see cornerstone get is a progress bar for big check outs.

I really wanted to love Cornerstone as a replacement for Versions that my team has been using for the last couple of years. On the surface Cornerstone is well done, it provides well thought out accesses to many of the basic features, and brings some interesting approaches to daily repository management. What Cornerstone gets wrong, however, causes more pain than its worth. I choose tools because they make my day-to-day life easier. They get out of the way and let me work the way I need to to be efficient. As it stands of this writing, Cornerstone requires to many forced compromises in workflow. We work with large media asset based projects that for several reasons require the libraries of media to be in the repository. If you have ever had to rename, move, or delete 200+ plus assets in a working copy from within the IDE or the Finder youll understand. Cornerstone provides NO graceful way was dealing with this. Rather I when you want to commit your changes in Cornerstone I have had to manually command-click each and every file and mark them for deletion. Are you kidding me? If your assets are located across several folders this issue gets even worse. Deleting a folder from the Finder, then marking it for deletion has caused Cornerstone to fail to commit the changes to the child objects on several occasions. I emailed their support, and the answer I got was not to delete files or folders from outside of Cornerstone. Conclusion: These guys got a lot right in Cornerstone, and this is a solid application for many people. For our use case, it just forces to many compromises as it stands now.

I have been using Cornerstone for a couple of months now, on a small iOS project. I cant claim to be a power user in this context - Im not getting into every nook and cranny of the app. But for the basics it has been very dependable and has performed very well. The UI is well layed out and puts those things you need every day front and center where they are easy to get to, while still giving you easy access to the less often used features. No complaints. Very satisfied. Highly recommended.

I really like the new features allowing me to use external merge tools helps a ton. However, Ive had problems with the log for over a year and its really painfull.

Ive been using Cornerstone for almost a year now, and 2+ years with subversion through the command line. I cant really say that its a true replacement to the CLI, but it definately kept me out of there quiet a few times. Unfortunately, it doesnt have git-svn integration, nor does it have some of those nifty features which can only be achieved over the CLI. If youre picky with how your directory structure is created, with Cornerstone, each folder created is considered a revision, while in the CLI, you can do something like: svn mkdir --parents --username foobar file:///path/to/repo/myproject/{trunk,tags,branches} -m "Initial directory structure" and have all those folders created under a single revision. In any case, the UI is user-friendly to the point where non-developers can just go ahead and create a repo on the spot. Developers will really appreciate how much time they can save with common tasks, so that they can focus on their work, rather than typing out long commands. Great job guys.

Cornerstone has a great set of features, way better than any other SVN GUI client. So why 2 stars? Because its only useful for very small, local repositories. If you have a significant number of files, or the repository is hosted on a remote server, Cornerstone slows down to a crawl. This is for a very simple reason: Every time ANY file in your repository is touched, Cornerstone does a COMPLETE svn refresh on your ENTIRE repository. Needless to say, if a full update takes more than a few seconds (due to size or network latency), the app becomes frequently unresponsive. A common workflow is, do some editing in Xcode, then switch to Cornerstone to check a diff or commit. The mere act of switching Cornerstone to the frontmost application does a full svn refresh, though, causing the app to be unresponsive for a long period of time (minutes, for me). But you cant switch away and do more work, because if you switch BACK, it will do ANOTHER refresh! The developers purposefully added this behavior, and telling them about performance problems gets you what is clearly a standard form email telling you its your fault for having such a large svn repository! Meanwhile the command line or other GUI clients (like Versions) work just fine for large repositories. Anyway, if your svn repository is only a few dozen files hosted locally, Cornerstone will be lovely. For professional developers it is, sadly, too frustratingly slow to use.

Its amazingly easy to grasp. It touches me surprisingly first, when I copy SVN URL of my repository in clipboard and try to add repository, it filled out all the fields accordingly based on clipboard info. As compare to other tools, Cornerstone gives more info in one screen but being a developer and used to with those type of environments in Eclipse, Xcode; seams very helpful and handy. Initially I felt little costly at first point, but this is something I am using 20+ times a day and frankly its worth its money just in few months itself. It saves your cost by comparing other free tools just in few cases when your SVN corrupts and you spend extra time behind it. I would genuinely recomend.

that Apple Sandboxing is going to make this very difficult to use in the near future. Will Cornerstone get special privileges?

Nearly a perfect Subversion GUI. It has everything I would want.

I switched from Versions mainly because there was no quick way to merge (had to keep going to the terminal). Boy am I glad I did…this is MUCH better! Great job!

Ive been using Cornerstone for about 1 yr and Im very satisfied with it. As an indie developer its the only SVN client Ive found for mac that makes merging easy. It also encourages my developers to properly use branching. The merging features are similar to the subversion client in Eclipse but even better. Thanks for a great product!

Allthough a little pricey, this is an excellenet peice of software. It has made my life so much easier. I was tired with weird behaviour of XCode SCM and the other app Versions was not so good. Since I started using Cornerstone, it has become extremely easy to manage my source code. Great kudos to the makers!

I tried to get by using free SVN clients (svnX and SlickSVN). I also tried Versions. But this is so easy to use, it is worth the money!

This is absolutely the best SVN client Ive ever used on any platform. Great user experience and easy-to-use integration. Love it so much!

I have been a Versions user for many years and just started a new job and it turns out that they use Cornerstone--and honestly after working with it I have to say it is far superior to any SVN client I have used on the Mac.. and on Windows for that matter. Sadly they dont have this for Windows. Anyway--dont hesitate.. grab this!