The GitHub for Code Review UI Needs Serious Innovation

Yes yes yes!

I am biased because I make/sell an alternative UI for GitHub code review (https://codeapprove.com) but I think most of us can agree that GitHub's tools for code review are not nearly as good as they could be.

We all spend time picking our VCS, our IDE, and our CI/CD systems. But for code review we just accept what comes out of the box!

There are so many good tools out there to level up your code review! Here are a few of my favorites:

  * CodeApprove (codeapprove.com)
  * Graphite (graphite.dev)
  * Reviewable (reviewable.io)
  * Axolo (axolo.co)
  * Viezly (viezly.com)
  * Mergeboard (mergeboard.com)
  * Codestream (codestream.com)
  * Pullpo (pullpo.io)
  * ReviewPad (reviewpad.com)
  * Planar (useplanar.com)
  * Visibly (visibly.dev)
  * Codelantis (codelantis.com)

Yep, I agree! I work at, and use, Reviewable (https://reviewable.io) and we're the best way to review code on GitHub because we've focused on making the whole process better at every step.

We've improved diffing, not only for large files (we support larger files than GitHub does) but also for understanding that diff. Have you ever reviewed a PR twice, but the second time around all your comments are gone and you have no idea what happened to the code since the last time you saw it? Unlike GitHub, Reviewable tracks PR's based on revisions, so you can see the diff between the previous revision and the current one, no matter what the author did to the branch to get here.

We've also improved commenting. The OP mentions putting a discussion in the sidebar because commenting on the main thread gets drowned out by GitHub's audit trail. With Reviewable, we separate the audit information from the main discussion, so you can discuss the PR, an individual file, or a part of a diff without losing track of or getting distracted away from any of those discussions.

We also support pre-approval of PR's that satisfy business requirements at a technical level. This is often taken advantage of by teams that have bots that make certain, software-checkable changes (such as whitespace-only changes), or monorepo organizations with an `experimental/$USER` folder structure.