GitHub vs. Mercurial

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
GitHub
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
GitHub is a platform that hosts public and private code and provides software development and collaboration tools. Features include version control, issue tracking, code review, team management, syntax highlighting, etc. Personal plans ($0-50), Organizational plans ($0-200), and Enterprise plans are available.
$4
per month per user
Mercurial
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It handles projects of any size and boasts an easy and intuitive interface. Mercurial handles projects of any size and kind. Every clone contains the whole project history, so most actions are local, fast and convenient. Mercurial supports a multitude of workflows and can enhance its functionality with extensions.N/A
Pricing
GitHubMercurial
Editions & Modules
Team
$40
per year per user
Enterprise
$210
per year per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitHubMercurial
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GitHubMercurial
Considered Both Products
GitHub
Chose GitHub
Bitbucket supports Mercurial VCS in addition to Git. Since it is an Atlassian product, Bitbucket is very well integrated with the company's other tools, like JIRA (which is widely used in the development industry), Jenkins, and Bamboo. It offers many of the same features as …
Chose GitHub
The most direct competitor to GitHub that I can think of would be BitBucket from Atlassian. The biggest advantage that I know of for BitBucket would be that they support both git and Mercurial. If you have at least one team or project using Mercurial, then BitBucket would be …
Mercurial

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
GitHubMercurial
Version Control Software Features
Comparison of Version Control Software Features features of Product A and Product B
GitHub
5.8
1 Ratings
22% below category average
Mercurial
-
Ratings
Branching and Merging8.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Version History8.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Version Control Collaboration Tools8.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Pull Requests7.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Code Review Tools6.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Project Access Control2.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated Testing Integration3.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue Tracking Integration5.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Branch Protection5.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GitHubMercurial
Small Businesses
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Perforce Helix Core
Perforce Helix Core
Score 6.3 out of 10
Perforce Helix Core
Perforce Helix Core
Score 6.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GitHubMercurial
Likelihood to Recommend
6.8
(122 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(26 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GitHubMercurial
Likelihood to Recommend
GitHub
GitHub is well suited for software development, GitHub is particularly well suited for software development projects, where teams need to collaborate on code, track changes, and review code changes. Also for open-source projects, GitHub is an ideal platform for open-source projects, where teams of developers from all over the world can collaborate on code and contribute to projects. For documentation, GitHub provides a platform for creating and sharing documentation, making it an ideal solution for teams that need to create and maintain documentation. On small and medium-sized teams GitHub is well suited as those teams that need to collaborate on software projects and track changes to their code.
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Open Source
If you generally think that to develop software you have to choose one repository, then in my opinion you have to choose between Mercurial and Git, there is not other solution. Mercurial also has a good merge tool which i can recommend. This gives you the flexibility to push just the "part of the feature", and is much better suited in the case where the "part of feature" and some other "part of the feature" both contain changes to the same file.
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Pros
GitHub
  • As a repository it's great. It houses almost all the open-source applications/code that anyone can fork and play with. A huge collection of sample codes available with problem statements across different domains make Github a one-stop location.
  • I use GitHub with Windows and the Git Bash is superb. It [is] a powerful alternative to the Command Prompt and Powershell. Allows me to run shell scripts and UNIX commands inside the terminal [on] a Windows PC.
  • GitHub integration with almost all cloud development/deployment platforms is amazing. Deploying a new application in Azure is really smooth. Just link the GitHub repositories and it's good to go. From automatic build to deployment everything is just amazing.
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Open Source
  • Branch
  • Distributed architecture
  • Stable
  • Platform independent
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Cons
GitHub
  • When browsing history of a file, GitHub could make it easier to see the file after a particular commit instead of just being able to quickly view the commit. I'd like to be able to see the commit or the file itself in one click.
  • I would like to be able to view commits by user.
  • I would love to be able to traverse code on GitHub (go to definition, etc) - the good news here is that they are working on these features!
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Open Source
  • Integration with visual studio
  • More integrated tools
  • When I install Mercurial I always have to do a hard restart of my computer.
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Likelihood to Renew
GitHub
GitHub's ease of use and continued investment into the Developer Experience have made it the de facto tool for our engineers to manage software changes. With new features that continue to come out, we have been able to consolidate several other SaaS solutions and reduce the number of tools required for each engineer to perform their job responsibilities.
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Usability
GitHub
- Easy to use compared to other version control software. UI interface makes it easy to use, as well as protects against making a major mistake by deleting code, etc. - UI looks modern. - Support for multiple platforms, which I assume will only get better with time. - Student benefits are awesome! - The size limitations on their repositories make sense to me. Not too crazy but realistic from a business perspective.
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
GitHub
It's a testament to how easy it is to use GitHub and how many others use it that you can pretty much find the answer to any problem you have by searching online. Consequently, I've never needed to use their support. It's an incredibly easy tool to set up initially, so it won't require much onboarding expertise to get started.
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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
GitHub
At the time to evaluation - Bitbucket was very tightly integrated into Atlassian’s suite of tools. For an organization that is starting out and looking to spend limited funds effectively - the cost/benefit of using that suite of tools usually doesn’t make sense. Granted things may have changed since then (its been over 5 years) - but at the time GitHub was effective - and all prospective engineers knew about it and already had accounts. This made it very easy to add to the organization and not lose time in training, etc. Developers seem to really love GitHub above most other tools out there - so that plays into the decision making as well.
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Open Source
When we chose Mercurial it was more popular from perspectives than Git and we have too many problems with the Microsoft team foundation solution. We also want to move from a centralized version of source control to a distributed one. We also were working more and more via the Internet with our source control so distributed version was only solution.
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Return on Investment
GitHub
  • Github has increased our rate of code development, increasing our publishing rate. This helps bring attention to the research we are doing and ultimately brings in more funding for further research.
  • Because GitHub makes my team more efficient, we are able to put more hours into code development / report writing rather than agonizing over different versions of code created without version control software.
  • We use a paid version of GitHub, because we work through private repositories, but the increase in productivity, efficiency, and research progress is definitely worth the price.
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Open Source
  • Improve time in merging
  • Branching enables us to keep separate version per customer
  • Good tool for programmers is sometimes a reason to stay
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ScreenShots