Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about Git Insight.
Is Git Insight free?
Git Insight offers a free trial via JetBrains Marketplace. After the trial, an individual license costs €10/year (€1/month) and an organization license costs €20/year (€2/month). For team leads, the plugin typically pays for itself after a single use — it saves 2+ hours per quarterly performance review, and your time costs far more than €20/year.
Does Git Insight send my code anywhere?
No. Git Insight makes zero network requests. All analysis happens 100% locally on your machine. No data is collected, no external services are contacted, no telemetry is sent. Your code and git history never leave your machine. This makes it easy to get approval from security teams — there are no data risks to evaluate.
Which JetBrains IDEs does it support?
Git Insight works with all JetBrains IDEs that have Git support: IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, PhpStorm, GoLand, Rider, CLion, RubyMine, DataGrip, Android Studio, RustRover, and Aqua. It requires IDE version 2025.2 or later.
How is Git Insight different from GitHub Insights?
Git Insight works with any git repository — GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or self-hosted. It runs entirely locally (GitHub Insights requires cloud access). It provides developer-level analytics with code navigation: you can click any stat to see the actual code changes. And it offers features that GitHub doesn't: developer merging, suspicious commit detection, token counting, and flexible code exclusions.
Can I use Git Insight for performance reviews?
Yes — this is one of the primary use cases. Open Developer Statistics, set the date range for the review period, then use the Changes tab to see which parts of the codebase each developer worked on. The Facts tab shows velocity metrics. Use Suspicious Commits to filter out formatting commits that would skew the data. We recommend analyzing periods of 6+ months for fair comparisons.
My developer has multiple Git accounts. Can Git Insight handle that?
Yes. The Merge Developers feature lets you combine multiple git identities (name + email pairs) into a single developer profile. This is common when developers commit from different machines (work laptop vs. personal) or change their email. Quick merge: select multiple developers in the table, right-click, and choose "Merge to [Developer]". Settings are saved in the project and can be shared with your team.
Will Git Insight slow down my IDE?
Git Insight is designed for minimal impact. It only analyzes when you click Refresh — there's no background scanning. Git log parsing is streamed (not loaded into memory all at once). Changing filters (dates, exclusions, categories) recalculates from cache without re-reading git history. Files larger than 10 MB are automatically skipped.
Can my team share Git Insight settings?
Yes. All settings (exclusion patterns, file categories, developer merge configurations, excluded commits) are stored in .idea/gitInsight.xml in your project directory. You can commit this file to version control so everyone on the team uses the same configuration — same exclusion patterns, same developer merges, same categories.
Does Git Insight work with monorepos or multiple git repositories?
Yes. Open Settings → Additional Repositories and add any related repositories by absolute or project-relative path. Git Insight treats them as one analysis target — Developer Statistics aggregates contributors across all repos, and a repository selector in the toolbar lets you toggle between "All", "Only current", or any specific repo. Scanning runs in parallel and results are cached per-repo, so switching views is instant. This works for monorepos with submodules, microservices, and any team that ships across several related repositories.
Can I group developers into teams?
Yes. Open Settings → Teams and create a team for each group you want to track (frontend, backend, DevOps, platform). Add developers to a team by selecting their git identity (name + email pairs from your git history). A team filter button then appears in the Developer Statistics toolbar — selecting a team filters every sub-tab (Developers, Commits, Changes, Facts, Suspicious). A developer can belong to multiple teams at once. Important: team membership is matched by raw git identity, not the merged display identity — if you've merged multiple accounts for one developer, add every raw identity to the team for complete filtering.
How do multi-repo and team settings get shared across the team?
All Git Insight configuration — additional repositories, team definitions, per-repo exclusion patterns, developer merges, category definitions — is stored in .idea/gitInsight.xml. Commit this file to your main repository so everyone on the team automatically gets the same setup when they clone. For multi-repo workflows, settings also synchronize bidirectionally between IDE projects that include the same repository, so you don't have to reconfigure merges or exclusions in every project that touches a shared repo.