GitHub vs. Slack

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
GitHub
Score 9.1 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
Slack
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Slack is a group messaging or team collaboration app that aims to simplify communication for businesses. Features include open discussions, private groups, and direct messaging, as well as deep contextual search and message archiving, and file sharing. Slack integrates with a number of other tools, such as MailChimp, Dropbox, and Google Drive. Slack was acquired by Salesforce in December 2020. The product is free to use, and also has paid plans with more features and greater controls. The…
$8.75
per month per user
Pricing
GitHubSlack
Editions & Modules
Team
$40
per year per user
Enterprise
$210
per year per user
Free
$0
Pro
$7.25*
per month per user
Business+
$12.50*
per month per user
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitHubSlack
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details*Per active user, per month, when paying once a year. Pro is $8.75 USD per active user when paying month to month. Business+ is $15.00 USD per active user when paying month to month.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GitHubSlack
Considered Both Products
GitHub
Chose GitHub
GitHub is way easier to navigate and manage a repo. Bitbucket and Gitlab I only use when I need a private repo since these are free
Chose GitHub
Did not have a lot of say in the choice to go with GitHub, I am a member of the operations team that uses GitHub for our work, but was not involved in the decision making process. As a user of the application, I can say that it has helped us keep consistent configurations …
Chose GitHub
The only other tool I have used is Tortoise SVN. That was helpful for not overriding other people's changes, but there was no way to really do a code review with it. We simply kept it so that we could have some history. GitHub makes it so much easier, as you do not need the app …
Chose GitHub
The only other ticketing system we use is Zendesk, which is not exactly the same. They are used differently but have the same idea of tickets. Both great for what they are used for and highly recommend.
Chose GitHub
Bitbucket and Gitlab are both really similar to GitHub in terms of a feature set, with the only real difference between these services being the price. In terms of features. The only small subtle differences are in the feature sets of each repository and the integrations that …
Chose GitHub
I prefer GitHub on a personal level because it is free for personal use. It allows me to work on things with friends, or have easy access to open source software because of this.
Chose GitHub
I find GitHub more user-friendly; code is much cleaner and it can be integrated with CICD and code pipeline which makes the release process much smoother and faster.
Chose GitHub
GitHub is the best git repository service available and the industry standard. It's fast, reliable, and constantly adding new services. Bitbucket and Gitlab are both good, free (or inexpensive) alternatives, but they lack some of the design and speed of GitHub. Both alternative …
Chose GitHub
GitHub has better branching features than Subversion. The code review process in GitHub alone makes it worthwhile, whereas we could have branches in Subversion, it was missing the ability to comment and review other people's code before checkin. GitHub has more control around …
Chose GitHub
Git and GitHub are so much easier to use. I didn't necessarily find the others that I've tried difficult, but they all had their quirks. GitHub has their quirks, but their quirks make sense once you really think about i. The other may or may not have command line options, …
Chose GitHub
In my opinion, GitHub beats all of the competition.

The other services offer some things that could be considered benefits in some scenarios: Bitbucket has good integration with other Atlassian products, Gitlab is self-hosted and completely free, Beanstalk integrates with some …
Chose GitHub
Traditional source control and sharing systems are far more limited and have substantially more operational overhead. Any organization housing the servers, and managing the software, for file sharing and source control are spending substantial time and money to do so. Github …
Chose GitHub
Bitbucket has an interface that is much uglier and much more confusing to use. The learning curve is therefore much greater with Bitbucket. However, Bitbucket allows for free private repositories for small teams, which is a huge plus, and if your team is small enough, that …
Chose GitHub
Local storage of your repository is not exactly the safest thing you should do, since if you lost your project, you lose your project. This is not really a great alternative when you are considering it over using some thing you can access from any computer at any time. GitHub …
Chose GitHub
I selected GitHub because I knew it integrated with more other services and seemed like the more established platform.
Slack
Chose Slack
I think the most similar to Slack is Discord. The other ones are more chats in the old fashion way. I mean, for the messager and WhatsApp the communication is for particular people mainly, it's not planned/developed for a company. You need the contacts to start to communicate. …
Chose Slack
our team's current non-Microsoft(Google) tech stack, hard-coded into our workflow. It's infinitely more customizable than Teams, easily meeting our requirements. Additionally, Slack has unlimited external users, whereas Teams has limitation, so Slack is the obvious choice for …
Chose Slack
We did not found the same level of features on all these products. Where Slack is better than other ones, is that you are interacting with other really fast, you can jump in open channels, private channels, be updated about topics and also manage different workspaces. The …
Chose Slack
Slack is systematically organizing channel for different groups and also notification of slack is very good compared to Microsoft Teams as in if you use same slack login with mobile as well as computer you get notified over both in slack while i was facing the problem in teams …
Chose Slack
Slack has great UI, high usability, and great integrations. I have not felt anything else even remotely closer to the quality of Slack.
Chose Slack
Slack is better in every way. Slack supports multiple workspaces in a single application. It allows to configure notification of each channels so that you receive messages that you need. Meetings with huddle is pretty awesome where we can have separate space for chat for that …
Chose Slack
Slack offers a seamless experience with a very simple and easy understandable user interface. Slack is better when it comes to memory management on Windows. The menu design offered by Slack to the left of the screen offers a much better user experience than those provided by …
Chose Slack
Before in the organization, we used Google Hangouts, but it was not well integrated into our team. The functionalities were very limited and could not cover our needs. The advice was very messy and we failed to meet the productivity objectives we had.
Chose Slack
Having had to use Skype/Lync in a former life as a Fortune 100 contractor, I can say that Slack's ease-of-use, customizability, and solid integrations with online tools puts it far ahead. It's nice to not be beholden to the Microsoft Stack for every little thing, as well. …
Chose Slack
I've used Discord which is a direct Slack competitor in tech/gaming communities and I have found both have strengths and weaknesses. Once I've gotten accustomed to certain text formatting features of Slack, I've found switching over to using Discord was sometimes disappointing …
Chose Slack
Slack has very useful and nice capabilities within its channels and integrations, but more sometimes can be less. Distraction can be a very bad factor for busy channels, and that might lead indirectly to losing information, especially since many users can set "snooze" on …
Chose Slack
Slack is more fun and the integrations and channels more it more sophisticated.
Chose Slack
Slack has better integration than HipChat and better mobile apps and mobile notifications.
Chose Slack
Google Hangouts has video conferencing which Slack does not have - this is essential for screen sharing (for engineers) as well as meetings with remote engineers, and is something slack does not provide. The chat feature of hangouts does not compare at all compared to Slack for …
Chose Slack
Slack is much better in ease of use, notifications, and useful features. Chatter is made by Salesforce, and yet Slack has much better Salesforce integration. The ease of transition between conversations is so much easier/intuitive than Skype, however Skype has the advantage of …
Features
GitHubSlack
Version Control Software Features
Comparison of Version Control Software Features features of Product A and Product B
GitHub
9.3
10 Ratings
7% above category average
Slack
-
Ratings
Branching and Merging9.610 Ratings00 Ratings
Version History9.610 Ratings00 Ratings
Version Control Collaboration Tools9.79 Ratings00 Ratings
Pull Requests9.710 Ratings00 Ratings
Code Review Tools8.89 Ratings00 Ratings
Project Access Control9.110 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated Testing Integration8.810 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue Tracking Integration8.810 Ratings00 Ratings
Branch Protection9.89 Ratings00 Ratings
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
GitHub
-
Ratings
Slack
7.9
625 Ratings
1% above category average
Task Management00 Ratings7.7428 Ratings
Gantt Charts00 Ratings6.961 Ratings
Scheduling00 Ratings7.8361 Ratings
Workflow Automation00 Ratings8.1394 Ratings
Mobile Access00 Ratings9.4598 Ratings
Search00 Ratings8.2605 Ratings
Visual planning tools00 Ratings7.3273 Ratings
Communication
Comparison of Communication features of Product A and Product B
GitHub
-
Ratings
Slack
8.8
633 Ratings
9% above category average
Chat00 Ratings9.6632 Ratings
Notifications00 Ratings8.8629 Ratings
Discussions00 Ratings9.2617 Ratings
Surveys00 Ratings8.1410 Ratings
Internal knowledgebase00 Ratings7.8409 Ratings
Integrates with GoToMeeting00 Ratings8.9110 Ratings
Integrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts00 Ratings8.7182 Ratings
Integrates with Outlook00 Ratings8.9120 Ratings
File Sharing & Management
Comparison of File Sharing & Management features of Product A and Product B
GitHub
-
Ratings
Slack
8.4
600 Ratings
4% above category average
Versioning00 Ratings8.2324 Ratings
Video files00 Ratings8.3538 Ratings
Audio files00 Ratings8.5525 Ratings
Document collaboration00 Ratings8.0426 Ratings
Access control00 Ratings8.3409 Ratings
Advanced security features00 Ratings8.3360 Ratings
Integrates with Google Drive00 Ratings9.0211 Ratings
Device sync00 Ratings9.0452 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GitHubSlack
Small Businesses
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Stackby
Stackby
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Troop Messenger
Troop Messenger
Score 9.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Perforce P4
Perforce P4
Score 7.3 out of 10
HCL Connections
HCL Connections
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GitHubSlack
Likelihood to Recommend
9.8
(131 ratings)
9.1
(625 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(25 ratings)
Usability
9.4
(10 ratings)
9.0
(248 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(26 ratings)
9.9
(68 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(5 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
GitHubSlack
Likelihood to Recommend
GitHub
GitHub is an easy to go tool when it comes to Version Controlling, CI/CD workflows, Integration with third party softwares. It's effective for any level of CI/CD implementation you would like to. Also the the cost of product is also very competitive and affordable. As of now GitHub lacks capabilities when it comes to detailed project management in comparison to tools like Jira, but overall its value for money.
Read full review
Salesforce
Slack is great for tracking commits to new coding projects. You can take parts of code that still need to be implemented later and easily search through the history of comments if there is something that goes wrong with a code commitment. It can be difficult for people that only like Teams to adjust to a new platform if you are using both to communicate.
Read full review
Pros
GitHub
  • Version control: GitHub provides a powerful and flexible Git-based version control system that allows teams to track changes to their code over time, collaborate on code with others, and maintain a history of their work.
  • Code review: GitHub's pull request system enables teams to review code changes, discuss suggestions and merge changes in a central location. This makes it easier to catch bugs and ensure that code quality remains high.
  • Collaboration: GitHub provides a variety of collaboration tools to help teams work together effectively, including issue tracking, project management, and wikis.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Huddles Run smoothly without any interferences.
  • Smooth individual calls quick and easy without any interruptions.
  • seamless notifications across multiple devices
  • The ability to easily tag a team member to urgently attend to a specific escalation.
  • Slack being user friendly and able to integrate easily with other platforms and apps.
  • How to easily open up different channels for different escalations and needs.
  • a safe direct messaging option.
Read full review
Cons
GitHub
  • Not an easy tool for beginners. Prior command-line experience is expected to get started with GitHub efficiently.
  • Unlike other source control platforms GitHub is a little confusing. With no proper GUI tool its hard to understand the source code version/history.
  • Working with larger files can be tricky. For file sizes above 100MB, GitHub expects the developer to use different commands (lfs).
  • While using the web version of GitHub, it has some restrictions on the number of files that can be uploaded at once. Recommended action is to use the command-line utility to add and push files into the repository.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Would love a better integration with GitHub. For example, notifications when your PR is updated, when review is requested, @-mention in comments, etc.
  • Improved "Later" tab, for example the ability to create to-do lists or making the "Later" tab into a more powerful to-do list (annotate items with notes)
  • More powerful integrations, e.g. Google Calendar could render a calendar view within Slack, rather than sending the daily schedule
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Salesforce
To be more transparent, I give 10 because Slack serves our collaboration needs. It provide us a good platform for team communication relaying important update within the company, it has even mobile app where you can install in your phone to monitor any updates within that team that needs your immediate attention and intervention.
Read full review
Usability
GitHub
GitHub is a clean and modern interface. The underlying integrations make it smooth to couple tasks, projects, pull requests and other business functions together. The insights and reporting is really strong and is getting better with every release. GitHub's PR tooling is strong for being web based, i do believe a better code editor would rival having to pull merge conflicts into local IDE.
Read full review
Salesforce
My rating was 7. Its intuitive interface and user-friendly features like channels, threads, and integrations make it excellent for team communication and onboarding. However, its usability is held back by the resource-intensive desktop app and cluttered feeling in large workspaces. The mobile app's performance and unreliable notifications have also been noted as weaknesses.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
GitHub
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Yes, the app works 24/7. I don't even recall having any period that we could not use since the implementation. Even the maintenance periods are barely noticeable and our work is not impacted by it when it happens.
Read full review
Performance
GitHub
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Slack is a soft app, we don't have many issues with it. I recall one or two people complaining about something during our usage period, but I didn't have a bad experience. When the app is slow, usually the problem is with my computer or my internet. The app works just fine.
Read full review
Support Rating
GitHub
There are a ton of resources and tutorials for GitHub online. The sheer number of people who use GitHub ensures that someone has the exact answer you are looking for. The docs on GitHub itself are very thorough as well. You will often find an official doc along with the hundreds of independent tutorials that answers your question, which is unusual for most online services.
Read full review
Salesforce
Whenever I've had to troubleshoot an issue with Slack (which, to be honest, has not happened very often), their online documentation has been easy to locate, easy to understand, and effective in resolving my issue. Slack's ever-growing popularity also means that there's a large community of practice out there that can be depended upon.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
GitHub
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
I was not part of the implementation team, but I recall being 100% happy and excited to learn and use a new tool. I'm still am to be honest.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
GitHub
While I don't have very much experience with these 2 solutions, they're two of the most popular alternatives to GitHub. Bitbucket is from Atlassian, which may make sense for a team that is already using other Atlassian tools like Jira, Confluence, and Trello, as their integration will likely be much tighter. Gitlab on the other hand has a reputation as a very capable GitHub replacement with some features that are not available on GitHub like firewall tools.
Read full review
Salesforce
I like Slack better than ClickUp, because I would spend 30-60 minutes a day updating my ClickUp tasks. The way ClickUp was used was very micromanaging. I billed by the hour, so I was willing to put in the time to alert the boss what tasks I was working on.
One of my jobs used Hive - I mostly just ran it in the background in case anyone messaged me. I did not use it often.
Read full review
Return on Investment
GitHub
  • Team collaboration significantly improved as everything is clearly logged and maintained.
  • Maintaining a good overview of items will be delivered wrt the roadmap for example.
  • Knowledge management and tracking. Over time a lot of tickets, issues and comments are logged. GitHub is a great asset to go back and review why x was y.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Slack has been incredibly helpful in connecting various tech apps and ecosystems, creating a more streamlined and responsive process.
  • Slack has made it significantly easier to communicate with our team members across multiple time zones, creating a more engaging environment for our all-remote team.
Read full review
ScreenShots