Reviewer name and names of any other individual's who aided in reviewer	Robert Reid
Do you understand and agree to our policy of having open and named reviews, and having your review included with the published manuscript. (If no, please inform the editor that you cannot review this manuscript.)	Yes
Is the language of sufficient quality?	Yes
Please add additional comments on language quality to clarify if needed	NA
Is there a clear statement of need explaining what problems the software is designed to solve and who the target audience is?	Yes
Additional Comments
Is the source code available, and has an appropriate Open Source Initiative license <a href="https://opensource.org/licenses" target="_blank">(https://opensource.org/licenses)</a> been assigned to the code?	Yes
Additional Comments	License: GNU GPL-3.0
As Open Source Software are there guidelines on how to contribute, report issues or seek support on the code?	Yes
Additional Comments	Being a github repo, forking, copying and contributing is all possible.
Is the code executable?	Yes
Additional Comments	Tested this tool out on 2 complex echinoderm species with genome sizes over 1GB each.
Is installation/deployment sufficiently outlined in the paper and documentation, and does it proceed as outlined?	Yes
Additional Comments	Following the get started section on the GitHub page, I was able to install SMARTdenovo in less than 5 minutes in a linux environment.
Is the documentation provided clear and user friendly?	Yes
Additional Comments
Is there a clearly-stated list of dependencies, and is the core functionality of the software documented to a satisfactory level?	Yes
Additional Comments	No dependancies that I am aware of but did not test in a clean environment. I could easily have had all the pieces already, as I first installed this tool in 2017.
Have any claims of performance been sufficiently tested and compared to other commonly-used packages?	Yes
Additional Comments
Are there (ideally real world) examples demonstrating use of the software?	Yes
Additional Comments	They test a publicly available dataset from drosophila, D. melanogaster (SRX499318) and use that as a benchmark for performance.
Is automated testing used or are there manual steps described so that the functionality of the software can be verified?	Yes
Additional Comments	The tests here can easily be repeated by anyone.
Any Additional Overall Comments to the Author	This is decent assembly tool that is straightforward and usable. It is not the tool for every de novo assembly out there but it is capable of producing comparable results to many other tools. The figure has a few poor font resolutions that be improved. The spacing in the figure could be made better. The Figure caption could use more clarity on explaining the 4 images.
Recommendation	Accept