While Git was initially meant just as the low-level interface, Cogito started with the stated goal of becoming a user-friendly front-end.
Cogito is generally considered to be more familiar to people used to working with other SCM tools like CVS and Subversion, although it still follows the model of distributed development used by Git.
Cogito has significantly fewer sub-commands than Git, in line with its purpose to present a simple user interface sufficient for common workflows.
Cogito is implemented as a set of Bash scripts (unlike Git, which is written mostly in C and portable Unix shell).
As of April 2007 the project is stalled and declared "for sale", because a lot of the functionality has already been taken over by git, and the maintainer, Petr Baudiš, decided it would be better to focus on improving git-core.