I loved SourceTree but abandoned it as soon as Atlassian made it impossible to use offline. I don't want an Atlassian or bitbucket or whatever the fuck account. Sublime Merge is pretty good IMO, but not good enough I'd want to pay for it.
I’ve used SourceTree maybe a month or so ago, and it was completely offline for a repo that’s not pushed to or connected with Bitbucket or Atlassian. Maybe initially there was a dialog box to create an account with or sign up for Bitbucket, but that was easily dismissed.
SourceTree was originally shareware – I'm pretty sure I expensed a license at whatever job I was at. When Atlassian bought SourceTree in 2011 their grand plan was to pimp it out in order to drive customers to Bitbucket. Eventually they were going to charge for it (so the worst of both worlds really). I noped out because it was clear that Atlassian wanted SourceTree to become a bitbucket client instead of remaining a git+subversion client.
I don't want a bitbucket account and never bothered to check how often it would phone home to ensure you had an up-to-date bitbucket account. I think the Sublime folks have a better track record here and I fully expect Sublime Merge to get to the point where I'd want to buy it if I wanted a git GUI.
Unfortunately for Atlassian, by 2011 Bitbucket already lost out to Github and they hadn't realized it yet.
I think Atlassian lifted those restrictions for Sourcetree at some point. I remember having to sign up for Bitbucket, etc., at one point, but my last few installs (on different companies' work computers) haven't put up any such roadblocks lately.
