Skip to main content
TrustRadius
GitHub

GitHub

Overview

What is GitHub?

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…

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

GitHub is a versatile and widely-used platform that offers a range of use cases for developers, researchers, and organizations. Users …
Continue reading

Developers love it

9 out of 10
September 25, 2021
GitHub is used by different departments in our organization. GitHub is used as a version control platform and deployment of our source code.
Continue reading

GitHub Review

8 out of 10
May 19, 2021
Git is very good for agile planning and maintaining the code according to different versions. In our project we work on three release …
Continue reading

GitHub is good VCS.

9 out of 10
May 12, 2021
GitHub is VCS is vastly used by organizations so does us. All of our developers are using GitHub to store code on the cloud and it's easy …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

Team

$40

Cloud
per year per user

Enterprise

$210

Cloud
per year per user

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://github.com/pricing#compare…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $4 per month per user
Return to navigation

Product Demos

How to use the new Jira and GitHub integration - Demo Den December 2021

YouTube
Return to navigation

Product Details

What is GitHub?

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.

GitHub Video

CEO Nat Friedman will introduce a demo packed session highlighting the latest feature updates. You'll hear directly from the Hubbers who helped build them and learn how we successfully use GitHub at GitHub to build GitHub on GitHub. As always, feel free to leave us a comment ...
 Show More

GitHub Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

GitHub starts at $4.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 8.8.

The most common users of GitHub are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(1028)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

GitHub is a versatile and widely-used platform that offers a range of use cases for developers, researchers, and organizations. Users collaborate in real time through GitHub's best-in-class tooling and simple interface, which is why it is commonly used for personal projects, university assignments, and managing code in team settings. The platform serves as the main integration point with other software, including continuous integration and continuous deployment services, allowing for seamless workflow automation.

GitHub's key use cases include code versioning and management, enabling developers to efficiently track code changes and revert back to earlier points in time. It also helps manage different versions of products for efficient development and deployment. With GitHub's collaboration features, developers can easily work together on code development, push code for others to pull, and collaborate with external contributors. Additionally, GitHub serves as a code hosting platform, allowing developers to easily share code and launch different application versions. It has become the go-to platform for hosting code repositories and establishing portfolios of work for developers in various industries.

Furthermore, GitHub plays a vital role in software research and development departments by providing a secure cloud-based Git repository system. It addresses concerns about longevity, security, and code management for technical project managers. The platform's integration with other tools like Slack, Jenkins, and custom webhooks enhances its functionality as a central repository for code storage, knowledge sharing, interactions tracking, and auditing. GitHub also offers built-in issue tracking capabilities and wiki pages for effective project management.

Moreover, GitHub's ease of use and graphical interface simplify the utilization of Git across platforms within organizations. Technical recruiters rely on GitHub to identify skilled developers while students leverage it for academic projects and assignments. Additionally, researchers utilize GitHub to store repositories from previous research projects and facilitate efficient team code development.

Overall, GitHub is highly regarded by users for its ability to solve challenges related to version control, collaboration on code development across teams or remote locations, issue tracking, project management, and code review. It serves as a central repository for code and provides features like CI/CD automation, documentation management, and easy integration with third-party tools.

Intuitive User Interface: Many users have found GitHub's user interface intuitive and easy to navigate, making it simple for them to explore repositories without the need to clone them. They appreciate how it simplifies the process of navigating through repositories, providing a user-friendly experience.

Fast Data Processing: Several reviewers have appreciated GitHub's speed in updating, packaging, and compressing data. This fast data processing allows for quick merges and highlights code changes efficiently, enabling developers to work with agility.

Robust Version Control: Users highly value GitHub's version control functionality as it provides a historical timeline of code improvements and the ability to revert back to older versions. This feature has been praised by many for its reliability and usefulness in maintaining code integrity throughout development projects.

Challenging to administer team members: Some users have found it challenging to effectively manage team members and collaborators across multiple repositories on GitHub. This becomes particularly difficult when there are varying access rights and roles, requiring extra effort and attention.

Confusing differentiation between user and organization accounts: Users often encounter confusion when trying to differentiate between user and organization accounts on GitHub. This lack of clarity can result in wasted time as they struggle to locate relevant settings or features within the platform.

Slow loading times: Atom, the text editor used in GitHub, has been criticized by users for its slow loading times. This delay can lead to frustration among users who expect a more seamless experience while navigating through their projects.

Users have made several recommendations about GitHub based on their experiences. Here are the three most common recommendations:

  1. Start with official documentation and use Git and GitHub via the command line. Users suggest that newcomers to GitHub should begin by referring to the official documentation. They also recommend utilizing Git and GitHub through the command line interface for a seamless experience.

  2. Explore integrations with Visual Studio Code and ClickUp. Many users recommend integrating GitHub with Visual Studio Code and ClickUp, as it enhances their workflows. This integration allows for smoother collaboration and improved project management.

  3. Improve user-friendliness and accessibility for new users. Some users believe that GitHub could be more user-friendly, especially for those who are new to the platform. They suggest making it more accessible by simplifying the interface or providing more comprehensive guidelines.

It is important to note that these recommendations reflect the opinions and experiences of users and do not represent a consensus among all users.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(76-100 of 122)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Mamoru Fujinoki, PMP, CSM, ITILF, LSSGB | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use GitHub as my source control service. I can easily track the code change, branch the projects, and go back to the previous change. It can also share the project files, collaborate with others, and showcase my coding experience. Also, I can get open source codes from other developers to use and to modify for new projects.
  • Source control
  • Programming collaboration
  • Developers community to share knowledge base
  • User interface
  • Free private repository
  • Language localization
It is good for especially open source projects. You can share and showcase the code publicly. However, this is not suitable if you do not want to share the code with others unless you pay for private repositories. And probably it is not suitable for projects that are for your clients and internal projects.
February 16, 2018

GitHub is a time saver

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Github is used by our whole organization. It solves the problem of version control. It's easier to make changes to a repository and rollback if things go wrong. It helps us to avoid a lot of manual work by tracking changes in an automatic way.
  • Github helps in highlighting changes made to your code and the difference from the previous commit.
  • We can branch off the main code if its a long term project as this may lag behind several commits made in that time frame.
  • Easier to track code changes by going through a detailed commit message.
  • Not much that I can state, maybe it has a learning curve for non-programmer people committing to the repository.
  • It has a specific set of instructions to follow. For example, if this is a repository where commits are frequent, the user will have to remember to update before pushing changes, if not this ends in merge conflicts.
  • Like all open source software, Github depends on it contributors. If this is not maintained in the future, we may have to switch over to another VC software or make do with what we have.
Github is best suited for keeping track of software development code, it can also be made public to give access to other people not within the org to contribute, this results in the code being open source. Github is not good for role-based contribution as in the case of giving access to a repository, the person can see everything including the source code. To avoid this, we can use GitLab.
Andrew Vawdrey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
GitHub is being used across all of our development and IT teams. It is being used to manage our code repos and managing out pull requests made by all of our users. It has been great in rolling out clean code and it is easy to manage, roll back and keep our repos going.
  • Easy to review, approve/reject and roll out new code
  • Great for large teams working on one code repo
  • Has great integrations with many popular Git clients like SourceTree or GitKraken
  • Bit of a learning curve but great once you get past it
GitHub is a must have for anyone that needs code management, code reviews, and code merging. Github is a perfect solution that will make your code repos delightful to work with. Github gives great access to your team to view your code changes and to approve or suggest changes. If you need changes you can easily edit it right in the browser UI.
February 05, 2018

Github review

Ruirong Chen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Github is being used as the code repository across the whole organization. It addresses the problem of code sharing/management within the company
  • Easy to use
  • Good support
  • used by other engineers in the industry
  • Might be hard to pick up from a different background
  • No phone support
If you need to start a new code project, or you need to start storing some files that will be shared among the organization and you need versioning of the files, GitHub is the way to go.
February 05, 2018

Github: The One and Only

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It was used by the whole organization. Github made Development teams collaborate with each other more effectively.
  • Responsive
  • Easy to understand
  • Exploring project which were worked upon by other team was made simpler.
  • N/A
  • N/A
  • N/A
In CI/CD enviroments where you want to find out if a pull request or branch that was pushed is stable or not by using web hooks that GitHub has.
January 30, 2018

GitHub Review

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Github across the entire organization, we use it for version control and commit any new code directly in GitHub. We also maintain our releases in GitHub and separate them using specific tags. We have several repos within our team which are used for developing, functional testing and performance testing. We maintain all the changes in GitHub and it provides a greater visibility to the rest of the team. We do code reviews on GitHub as well.
  • Release version control
  • Release notes
  • Third-party plugins to show updates in JIRA
  • Code check-in
  • I find GitHub [to be] an awesome resource, sometimes reverting a particular version can be tricky
Great resource to maintain code across teams, I love how individual branches can be maintained and pulled by other peers. It is a great common tool, we have an enterprise GitHub account for our company.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's only used by engineering, but basically everyone from Devs to Ops uses it across all of our applications. It's the most prolific VCS by far and for good reason. It works well, and helps you write good code while also promoting teamwork. It would be unimaginable to not have GitHub at our disposal. Things would be much more difficult, especially among remote developers!
  • Branches are super useful, lots of ability to go back and forth between different revisions of the code
  • Allows multiple developers to work on a single file
  • It's somewhat intuitive and once you have the hang of it it becomes second nature
  • There is a learning curve
  • It's basically the VCS everyone uses, monopoly?
Great for any engineering team. It has great formatting and allows anyone to easily access an entire codebase just through the web browser. The documentation is also awesome, so anyone can get up to speed. It makes pushing code super easy, and also helps with the code review process in the form of pull requests. It's a must-have these days for any software company.
Jeremy Hawes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We primarily use GitHub as it relates to those external from our company. It allows us to use their utilities/apps, contribute to them, subscribe to them, and ultimately collaborate with them in any further development that is needed. It is also a great place for us to store internal projects that we would like to be open source and available to other contributors in the development community.
  • Version Control
  • Cloning applications
  • Merging code/development changes
  • Viewing/Presenting code changes
  • Built-in tutorial into the UI
Whether a private or public project (though private costs money) GitHub is extremely well suited for a web-based, version controlled repository for any online application.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We make use of GitHub for version control. We have a team of developers who constantly make changes to the source code and update their files accordingly. We needed a version control software which will address those needs. So we made use of free source open software. It helped us for contributions to our open source projects. GitHub pages help you host static websites of your website for reference to other users.
  • Connecting securely via ssh
  • Track changes in your code across versions
  • You can integrate with other platforms like google cloud and Amazon
  • Less personal changes
  • Code is not always easy to understand
  • Less maintainable
Large organizations, large teams of developers who constantly make changes to their source code. Sometimes in smaller organizations, striving for completeness may lead to complexity. There is always a risk of unsolvable design conflicts, that can lead to disputes among teams.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use GitHub as the main repository service for all of our projects, from websites to applications to style guides. Our account is set up primarily for departmental use, but really GitHub is used across most of IT in the organization. GitHub allows us to get work done well in a team environment.
  • Source control
  • Uptime
  • Collaboration
  • Project management
  • Ease of use
  • Speed
  • Design
  • Pricing
  • Project management
GitHub is well suited for people or organizations that want the best git repo service available. It is for those who are comfortable with paying for the somewhat pricy plans or for those who are okay with leaving projects as open source. If you can't afford the GitHub plans and you don't want to leave all your projects as open source, then there are other free services available that will work just fine, leaving out some of the luxuries of GitHub.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
GithHub is the source of truth for our codebase. Github holds the source code used to build our SaaS product. We use multiple clusters of code in a multiverse type environment and GitHub allows us to keep all of these different clusters in a single space. Github also allows us to pull down the code to our local machines easily via the GitHub desktop client or command line. We can edit the code and make changes, publish the changes to a branch on GitHub and then merge those changes into our master code that spins upon our user-facing production servers.
  • Keeps track of individual code changes and commits to your change branch
  • Allows for efficient and well-understood code-reviews
  • Co-collaboration on PR's is well executed and communicated
  • Ability to have pre-checks implemented before allowing for a merge to happen (IE: Client version number checks, third-party deploy software queue checks)
  • The editor can have a bit overly manual PR explanation.
  • When new code is committed, the PR doesn't refresh on its own.
  • If you don't have access to GitHub or aren't logged in, links to a PR just return a 404 message page which gives no context to why you cannot access the page.
If we didn't have GitHub, we wouldn't have the company we have today. The fact that it's free and has such a great collaboration with our other tools makes it an invaluable tool. I had a really tough time coming up with "cons" for Github because of how well they do everything. From code changes to code review to deploying code to internal communication, Github does it all for us. We don't utilize Github's "issues" feature much because we track issues/user stories elsewhere (in JIRA). I think it's a beneficial feature, but it doesn't work on a collaborative base as well as JIRA does.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The main users of GitHub at my company are the people on the Engineering, Data Science and Analytics teams. It serves as our version-controlled code repository for our code and files that power most parts of our website and business functions. GitHub allows people across these teams to collaborate in real time.
  • Version control - GitHub has a record of past commits, so that people can see what changed. We can also revert back to older versions if need be.
  • Easy collaboration - Users can access and edit each other's code.
  • Widely used by many people and organizations - since GitHub is a popular tool, technical workers may see more value in learning the specifics of this tool. There are many resources available to learning it.
  • GitHub appears to be more developer-focused, and it might be difficult for non-programmers to get up to speed on how it works.
  • You must pay to get a private repository (default is that your files will be public).
  • Size limitations prevent users from viewing larger files in preview mode.
GitHub is well suited for personal users who want to store versions of their code for easy sharing. Similarly, companies who need a version controlled, collaboration tool will find GitHub useful.
GitHub will be less useful for companies who already have alternatives implemented. Its competitors have easy integrations with other tools like JIRA, which might make those options a better and cheaper alternative to GitHub.
December 14, 2017

Git enthusiast

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
GitHub became 2 to 3 years ago the new standard developer repository. Like most companies, we came from CVS/SVN world which used to fit our needs but with some gaps. Thanks to the distributed architecture of Git, developers can now manage their own repositories and merge their modifications with master or dedicated branches. With modern tools and modern approach (CI/CD) GitHub is the perfect solution for multi developers teams. The process of pull request is now standard in our organization and enables better code quality with additional review step.
  • GitHub is capable of integrating with modern devops approach (ci/cd) and most of the tools in such flows (jenkins or Bamboo).
  • GitHUb is capable of generating notifications for specific cases (i.e. webhooks) that allow triggering builds or deployments.
  • GitHub is following the modern way of sharing content in public or private spaces. We can find the same ideas with dockerhub, vagrantcloud, etc...
  • Until now, we didn't face any limitations in our current job. The only evolution we foresee is an evolution of the command line cli which should be easier to use
  • An additional evolution would be around the documentation of repositories (i.e. README.md files) that should be more documented for nicer presentations.
GitHub is becoming a standard for source control management. This job is well executed. A developer team can be small or large, each developer manages their own version of source code. The pull request allows to merge branches after manual code review.

GitHub is not appropriate for document versioning (i.e. Word, PDF, etc...) as we are not able to merge these kinds of documents. It's preferable to use alternative solutions (Alfresco, SharePoint, etc...)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Github is being used across our organization.

We use github for following needs:

  • Version control repository
  • Manage teams and organization
  • Code sharing
  • Review board & code review
  • Keep track of issues and project status
  • Github pages (wiki) features are widely used across teams for creating runbooks
  • We use github API's to automate certain tasks
  • github gist comes in handy to share code instantly without having to create repos
  • The interface of Github is very intuitive and the best compared to any other versioning tool on the market. Github makes version control simple and very user friendly.
  • Built-in CMS: With GitHub pages you can create the runbook/documentation websites for your project in no time and no hosting needed.
  • Distributed source control and no central repo to depend upon.
  • GitHub does a pretty good job of serving assets. Everything is automatically gzipped and minified.
  • The issue tracking feature of GitHub has made it easy for developers to work around on bugs.
  • You can track project/features/issues status in github without having to maintain them on jira or rally.
  • GIT GUI needs a lot of improvement and developers community prefer CLI instead.
  • Cosmetic: It's not easy to can't edit the commit message once you post it.
  • It's bit hard to work with merge conflicts.
Github is well suited:

When you want to work with colleagues collaboratively, share code, version control, track issues/project status.
To contribute to your favorite open source projects.
Maintain useful lists (markdown).
Share code snippets on the fly.
Create CMS (static content) websites for runbooks/documentation.
API integration with third party tools.

Where GitHub is less appropriate:

Not well integrated with tools like Jira, Crucible, Bamboo, Jenkins




Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Github in our organization, literally for everything as a code repository. First problem it solved is we didn't have the need to develop a tool to find the code diff and is used a repository for multiple versions.
  • Versioning.
  • Code difference is easy to find out.
  • Easier to integrate with many Cloud based applications or anywhere as it support API's.
  • I feel the first thing where GitHub needs improvement is they provide code hooks, but the code hooks need to have multiple other functionality to integrate with other notification systems.
  • The UI has to be modified to give a much cleaner interface for code difference, like having a split screen to view the code changes side to side.
Well Suited: Where you need a code versioning system and don't want to maintain the infrastructure.

Less Appropriate: In cases where code needs live editing which is not supported yet as in many other versioning tools.
Kevin Van Heusen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
GitHub is providing source control for our engineering department. We use it to manage source code for multiple releases, and our QA team uses it as well to ensure their work does not get lost. It also provides functionality for code reviews so we can ensure that our colleagues are following our coding standards.
  • GitHub has great code review features. You can approve or deny someone's pull request and add comments.
  • GitHub makes it easy to do a diff between changes requested in a Pull Request.
  • GitHub makes it easy to create multiple branches if need be and facilitates managing those branches.
  • The pull request interface sometimes generates an error message and requires you to use a different page to make a pull request.
  • Ignoring white space differences should be a UI option, instead, you have to know about an undocumented query string parameter (?w=1).
  • Would be nice to have a view for differences between branches, not just pull requests.
GitHub is well suited for a team of engineers, it makes it easy for team members to collaborate. For a very small team/single user, it may have more features than needed, but in general it should meet the needs of any team out there. It has the ability to create private repositories so others can't see your code.
September 25, 2017

Github to the rescue

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Github is used solely for source control across our entire organization. All languages, business groups, etc. All legacy code has been migrated over to it.
  • Code search. Ability to find examples of other people using a library, property, etc. is invaluable.
  • Pull request ease of use is great, and ability to integrate with CI pr jobs and code coverage is a big plus.
  • Ability to easily do feature branches and merge.
  • I wish it supported quoted full string search. Problem with code is I look for things that have periods or other special characters that GitHub treats as a separator. I want to be able to look up a quoted string for full exact search.
  • Ability to search by specific branch names- so search code across entire GitHub in branches named Master, etc.
Github is great for large enterprise organizations due to the speediness of its searching through code.
Gabriel Freire | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
GitHub's being used as a platform to host and control software of various groups of students, in various departments, although mainly on the Computer Science related ones. It allows for better and more efficient collaboration between team members as every single byte of code that's changed is easily verified in a very visual manner. There used to be some problems merging code from various students in a single project but GitHub definitely played a major role in diminishing this problem.
  • Improves collaboration between team members
  • Makes it easier to implement/test new features as it removes any risk of messing with the main source code
  • Allows for better control of changes
  • Makes it easy to set and visualize the progress of the projects' goals
  • The desktop application is a bit limited in terms of more advanced options
GitHub is as amazing tool for anyone into software development. Both small and big projects work great on the platform and the same can be said about the team size. The only scenario where I don't see GitHub as essential would be a project that already had some equivalent version control system and even then the situation should be carefully analysed as not every VCS is as interesting as GitHub.
Andrew Shell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We're a SaaS company and we use GitHub to host all of our private and public git repos. It helps us easily manage collaboration between our internal team of developers as well as the contract developers we hire from time to time. It allows us to easily see a history of changes to our code, but also helps with tracking issues and doing code reviews.
  • Pull Requests are a great way for developers to work on their own forks and then when it's ready to merge they can submit a pull request and another member of the team can review the code before it gets merged.
  • Reliable hosting. I've never had any kind of significant issue with availability of my repos. Once in a while, there might be a hiccup, but it's usually resolved within 5 minutes.
  • Having a wiki available for each repository is a great way to add documentation for your code. If there are instructions for deploying, or information explaining the reasoning for doing something, it's great to be able to just add a page to the wiki.
  • There are certain developers whose work I rely heavily on. I wish it was easier to browse and search all the repositories they contribute to.
  • I'd like to see more granular control of how I watch repositories that I don't own. If I choose "watching", I get notified every time something happens. I'd like to be able to choose what events I want to be notified about (new push, new tag, etc). I'd also like to be able to choose a digest notification where I get one email a day with the events I'm interested in.
  • It would be great if there was a way to automatically keep forks up to date. It has support for merging, so why couldn't a toggle to keep a fork updated with the upstream. That way everytime a commit gets pushed it would get rebased into my fork.
GitHub is the best if you're doing any kind of open source development. It's the largest community and public repos are free. If someone is planning on creating a lot of private repos, Bitbucket is less expensive. If you need even one private repo, an organization on GitHub has to pay $25/month while Bitbucket is unlimited private repos for up to 5 users for free.
Anand Chhatpar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Github is our primary repository for all the code in the company. All developers push their code to our github repo first and then issue pull requests to merge the code into a master branch that is then deployed to our production servers. The main problems github solves for us are: (1) speeding up code reviews, (2) Helping merge production-ready code from different developers, (3) track a version history so we can always go back and check what the production server code looked like at any point in history. Frankly, for a software focused company with multiple developers, github is extremely central to all operations and I cannot imagine any modern organization operating without it. Managing our own repo outside of github is a tremendously painful and expensive operation -- especially the part about keeping the stack up to date to ensure it is secure at all levels.
  • Code reviews are easy to do with github. Developers can comment on each others' code and approve or reject changes in a pull request. They can also request specific improvements to the code before it is merged,
  • Github helps merge production-ready code from different developers. They provide automated merging based on git and you can also do many operations that would normally need the command line directly from their web-based UI.
  • Tracking and searching through the version history of the code is 10x faster and easier with github compared to other git servers/clients.
  • Adding collaborators to the organization and managing access credentials for incoming and outgoing employees is particularly easy with Github.
  • Their built-in continuous integration tool lacks the sophistication and configurability of a mature tool like CircleCI.
  • They don't provide easy ways to deploy specific branches to specific servers. You have to connect your own deployment system (like capistrano or heroku's pipeline) manually to your github repo.
Github is really useful for companies with multiple developers that have to collaborate on the same code base. Whenever you introduce coupling or overlaps among the tasks of developers, you will need a Git repo and there's currently (as of mid-2017), no better system for managing your repositories in the cloud.

I'd say Github is less appropriate if you have just 1 or 2 developers, although if you expect the team to grow in the future, it would still be wise to use github from the start.
Charles Anderson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use GitHub across our entire (small) software development organization for software configuration management (version control). We also use it for dev-ops - again, for configuration management/version control. For the most part, we do not use the wiki or issue tracking functions - just the core git functionality. Our developers also use GitHub when forking open-source tools that we use in order to develop enhancements or bug fixes.
  • Hosting git repositories - GitHub is rock solid, and very reliable. It's much easier than maintaining our own servers.
  • The collaboration features - pull requests and code reviews. Having the complete framework for facilitating the collaboration, including email notifications, is great.
  • The user (collaborator) mechanism is simple and straightforward. In our organization, we do not need complicated access control facilities.
  • The integration with other services (e.g. Slack) is great.
  • I sometimes wish I had a better view of the various branches in our repository. However, I can address that need with client-side tools.
  • With open-source projects that are (semi) abandoned, it can be hard to locate a good fork to base one's work or fork off of. That's not really a problem with GitHub as much as a problem with projects that get abandoned.
GitHub works great for our small team where we don't have a lot of bureaucracy. I can imagine that in larger, more complex organizations they might want more controls and auditing - i.e., things one finds in a centralized version control system.
Randall Kelley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use GitHub throughout our research and development teams for version control of our products and test automation. Version control has always been a finicky process and GitHub is actually very straightforward and fairly easy to use once you get rolling with it. It's been easy to share repos across remote teams, as well.
  • Quick and easy: It's easy to create a new repository and via the command line get updates push to your remote repos.
  • Command line driven: After a small learning curve using the command line to drive pushing commits to GitHub is simple.
  • Sharing: I worked with teams across the country and we're able to easily share repo's with minimal issues.
  • Learning curve: While it doesn't take long to understand the basics, I have found there have been a few "gotcha's" that I didn't foresee causing some code changes to disappear or were hard to find.
  • I have been spoiled in the past where I was usually the only one using my code, but recently I've been sharing my repo's, so I had to do versioning the right way. That was a little confusing on main vs. forked repo and why. Then there's the local repo and then syncing everything up. Takes some time to really get it.
We're a medium sized company with remote teams and we've had very good success using GitHub. I would imagine that this would scale up to larger companies just as well. Even very small companies and teams would be benefit from using GitHub. In my opinion, GitHub is well suited for any size team.
August 30, 2017

Advantages to GitHub

Kevin Patrick Westropp | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Github powers our projects by providing a central repository for all our code, plus all changes including tools to manage and track said changes. It also provides great code review and collaboration tools to help make sure our code base is efficient and minimizes the number of defects introduced thorough out the whole development lifecycle.
  • Code Hosting in a central spot.
  • Access management.
  • Code review.
  • Code collaboration.
  • Searching through code bases
  • Tracking issues by linking to specific lines in the code base.
  • More robust wikis and readme files
Code management, code review, code collaboration
Julio Toledo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use GitHub across the company to distribute source code, track changes, collaborate with clients and subcontractors, and store release versions. GitHub is great for this kind of stuff, especially for open source/public repositories. While there is a paid option for private repositories, we don't always use GitHub for those types of projects.
  • "Diff" code bases so that you can easily identify which lines were added/deleted or modified between commits.
  • "Fork" code bases so that you/others can take projects into different directions.
  • Collaborate with others, including developers and customers and track issues and bugs.
  • Initial learning curve, especially for clients and non-traditional developers.
  • UI not terribly intuitive, perhaps there should be more ways to customize what's visible to users depending on their role.
GitHub is ideally suited for web development languages and open source projects. It is also ideally suited for code distribution and team collaboration. Privacy/security, even for paid private/local code repositories, remains a concern. If your monetary investment in your source code rises above a certain level and you are interested in protecting and securing that code, then there may be other tools and methods better suited for tracking/managing that source code.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
GitHub is currently being used by our Software Development Group as source control repository. This solved a problem with remote employees or when working offline to allow software developers to continue to work and when connected to merge their source code and get latest. This tool makes it easier for code reviews and manage source code that will make it to the next step in the release process.
  • Working offline
  • Merging source code
  • Having multiple branches at once
  • No testing service for source code
  • There is a bit of a learning curve when switching to GitHub
  • GUI interface is lacking or hard to understand, better to use commands
It is great for first time coders and students as it is free. This is also great for professional coding environments as long as you are willing to pay the costs for it. If you are a smaller group it is probably not economical to use this unless you can somehow get by on the free version.
Return to navigation