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…
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GitHub is probably the best - in code - collaboration tool out there.
Using GitHub allows developers to make fast and accurate code …
GitHub best code review software ever
Leveraging GitHub as a foundational building block for your technology teams.
The industry standard software versioning tool. Seriously, if you develop code, you need GitHub.
Manage Everything in One Place with GitHub
GitHub - A must have tool for developers
Thanks to GitHub that lets us manage source code without hassle
Gateway to the open-source community
Developers love it
The best code hosting and collaboration tool
GitHub Review
Great code hosting and collaboration tool
GitHub is good VCS.
GitHub: a product so perfect it's become synonymous with Git
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Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Team
$40
Enterprise
$210
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $4 per month per user
Product Demos
How to use the new Jira and GitHub integration - Demo Den December 2021
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is GitHub?
GitHub Video
GitHub Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(1028)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
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:
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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.
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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.
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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
(1-25 of 25)There is no other Hub like this one!
- Version Control - You can see the progression of where you started to where you are today, and if need be, rewind to a certain time in the past and use that version if need be.
- Storage Space - There are really no limits to the amount of information you can keep in one place.
- Collaboration - Contributors can be one or can be many, and GitHub keeps track of each instance by the author.
- UI - Although there is a readme file that can be made to look pretty, over the UI is very dry.
- App or web app - If there we an easier way to integrate with GitHub versus the command line, I am sure the number of users would increase dramatically.
- Glossary of Actions - There is not one place to which one author could go to find an absolute glossary of what actions do and what those actions are. Very hard to decipher the amount of information available on the web.
The best hosted version control and software collaboration tool
- Integrations with services like Heroku that allow us to deploy staging environments from a pull request.
- Familiarity with other developers making it easy to add a collaborator to a project and have them make a productive impact on the project right away without learning new tools.
- It makes it easy to review and collaborate on open source projects and private ones.
- It has many GUI client options for those who are not as comfortable with the command line.
- Helpful reporting of contributor activity and built-in project management features like docs and comments.
- In some ways, the design of GitHub incentivizes the use of certain practices like using pull requests, which may not fit your organization's workflow (though I don't really see this to be an issue personally, and if your organization isn't using something like pull requests, then I would question why).
GitHub: The ubiquitous code repo solution that just works
- It's very easy to use. It walks you through much of anything that you may have questions with. Like how to link a local repo to your online one.
- It's ubiquitous. So many open-source projects are hosted on GitHub.
- Integrations abound: With that ubiquity, you get some great benefits of tie-ins existing and new tooling. For example, there are continuous integrations for deployment and cutting-edge integrations with tools like Zeit Now and Netlify.
- They have some nice-to-have features like security bots that will auto bump versions of dependencies for your project (if you desire.)
- The social aspect of it is pretty nice and works well.
- It's a good thing to have for a developer resume.
- Git can be cumbersome and confusing as a whole, so sometimes the UI is a little too basic.
- It got bought by Microsoft.
But then again, having a "GitHub profile" is a worthwhile endeavor for any developer looking to get a job.
Solid and reliable code version control system that makes distributed collaboration easy.
- GitHub's ease of use is one of its biggest strengths. The site is structured around Git, a code version control system, which is used by developers around the world. GitHub's UI is minimal and allows you to focus on what's important, whether it be your branches, pull requests, or issues.
- GitHub's integrations and tools are fairly ubiquitous. You'll likely find an integration with GitHub on every development tool with integrations. This makes it easy to incorporate in whatever workflow you may have.
- GitHub is incredibly reliable. I don't remember the last time it was down for any significant period of time. This is essential for companies that rely on it for their daily operations.
- While GitHub's spartan UI gets the job done and doesn't distract, it has some room for improvement to make things even more intuitive, especially for newer users. There's a certain amount of learning curve that could be made less steep.
- There's so much you can do with Github that it's fairly common for a user to possibly only use a small fraction of what GitHub can do. Improving Github's discovery features would help surface some of the non-essential features that are quite useful.
There aren't many situations where you should use GitHub. Even a single programmer would benefit from using it. Furthermore, it has other uses related to issue tracking and documentation that increase its value.
GitHub - Versioning Control
- GitHub is a place where we can keep the artifacts such as source code, lookup data, and other callable information. GitHub can be integrated with deployment tools such as Jenkins, TeamCity and any cloud DevOps tools. These tools can call/read the code or data from GitHub which works as a hub or repository.
- GitHub works as version control. Meaning, when you upload the code script with multiple changes, the GitHub stores old copies as versions. If you want to restore back to the point-in-time code script, GitHub provides you to restore it. So GitHub gives security over your code.
- GitHub provides public and private access. Public is free. Private charges. For proof of concept projects, development or testing, we can use PUBLIC access which is cheap or free.
- GitHub is great tool. when you want to push a code change or small update, you would need to required to pull the entire GitHub repository unto your PC. This need to mitigate.
It is also a good place for storing code for later use.
- GitHub makes it easy to review code.
- Very lightweight platform makes it easy to make changes and download code in no time.
- Code highlights and syntax look amazing.
- Making your code available any time anywhere is so awesome.
- I like that it is free, but the paid version is a bit pricey.
- I wish the desktop client offered more options, as the commands are not so easy to learn.
- There is really not that much to complain about, but It has a large learning curve and providing learning documentation could be a big help.
Best fit for a team of developers who like to review and make changes easily while developing.
GitHub success with over 100,000 peer employees.
- The vendor continuously updates the product, keeping it secure and stable.
- The effort of administration is easier than with most other repositories. Maybe two hours a week.
- An excellent User community and high-quality Documentation online.
- Sunday vendor support for normal Licenses. Most often, upgrades are implemented on Sundays.
- The LDAP link often times out due to the extreme size of our ADS Repository. However, LDAP login remains working perfectly.
- Additional support for Single Sign-on applications, although it does support 2FA and more recently CAS connection.
An excellent choice for version control!
- The GitHub feature I like most is that it keeps track of all changes made to a project. Prior to using GitHub, I would write code, delete parts of it and rewrite it...only to realize a few weeks later that I should have kept the original version. With GitHub, I can always go back to a previous version.
- Although GitHub has a bit of a steep learning curve, it is relatively easy even for beginners to get started. The GitHub website has clear directions for creating a repo, setting up an account and the basics of the GitHub workflow. I found these tutorials very helpful when I started using GitHub.
- I like that GitHub has options in terms of user interface. Currently, I use GitHub via the command line, but there are also GUIs that make GitHub accessible to beginners as well.
- Recent versions of MATLAB, R, and PyCharm (plus others) include options to link to a GitHub repository.
- GitHub is not easy to learn for beginners. It took me about a year to really feel comfortable with it. For those who are not experienced programmers, GitHub can be difficult to get used to.
- Although I appreciate that GitHub allows merging of different versions, merging two conflicting versions can be quite difficult. The default merge tool in GitHub is vimdiff, which I found incredibly unintuitive. I installed a different tool, Meld, which I like much better.
- One of the best things about GitHub is that it is free. However, with a free account, you can only create public repositories (anyone can access your repository). You can create private repos in GitHub, but they are not free.
GitHub - to isolate developer skill sets
- Identifying developers who have particular skill sets or interests beyond the stack they use.
- Demonstrating a developer candidate's knowledge, coding, and philosophies
- Showing that a developer is dedicated and passionate about their work - GitHub is voluntary - if they're spending time on there, it's because they want to be.
- Finding the passive seeker - GitHub isn't a job board.
- A lot of developers and recruiting sites don't realize how important location still is - not everyone is willing to allow remote workers. Being able to know where the developer lives would be so helpful.
- It would be great if companies could create exercises for people to complete - just to see if they are a fit. To make it part of the hiring process would require validation. If it's a voluntary exercise, it would be easy.
- Knowing the background & years of experience of the developer.
Great Service for many different teams!
- GitHub does a great job at managing issues and assignment of issues with team members. Their easy-to-navigate issue portion of each repository makes it easy to identify which issues have to do with each branch, and which team member(s) are assigned to each issue.
- GitHub has a variety of useful integrations with other software like Slack, which makes it easy to comment on code commits in a team-chat setting.
- GitHub's wiki section of each code repository is a very useful tool to introduce in-depth documentation pertaining to the code in that repository.
- GitHub can get quite expensive for teams, since they charge for plans that include more than 2 people.
- There is no free mobile app integration or manager in case you want to check your code commits on the go.
- If you're new to VCM or Git, GitHub doesn't really have a formal learning process or introduction on their platform. You will have to look elsewhere for a good tutorial on how to use GitHub/Git.
Github is the gateway to better team management
- Githubs does a great job of visually showing commit history.
- The UI is clean and easy to navigate through. It has a lot of useful features no matter how small. Such as assigning issues/pull requests, labels and milestones.
- Gist is a great tool for keeping quick, short snippets in a central location
- The online community surrounding github makes it one of the best learning resources.
- No three view for each repo. They have extensions for work arounds, but it intutive and should be a main feature.
- If someone is new to GitHub, one of the challenges is learning all the ins and outs with the github model, which requires practice and time.
- Unless you pay for github. there are no private repo's which is sad.
GitHub is a time saver
- 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 thing since sliced bread
- 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
The only VCS you should consider
- 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?
GitHub is a leader in Version Control and Collaboration
- 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 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.
Best commercial version control tool: GitHub
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.
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
Go Git GitHub and Be Good To Go!
- 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.
What's the Diff? Ask GitHub
- "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.
Why GitHub is the right choice.
- 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
GitHub: The Octocat is still going strong
- GitHub has an easy to use interface that allows you to create and customize the settings of your repositories in minutes. You can quickly push your code up to your new repo and assign team members to varying roles and access to perform different operations as required. This is important for reducing the time you have to spend on managing your teams.
- The documentation for the service is clearly and thoughtfully written with an eye for detail, and has terrific tutorials to help you progress from a novice to an advanced user.
- The service makes it easy to contribute to other projects and submit pull requests to get your code updates into the repository. This is important both for collaboration and for contributing to open source projects.
- It has an excellent search interface to locate repositories that you can review to learn and develop your technical skills and understanding of coding practices.
- Github offers free accounts to anyone and you can create as many repositories as you want. However, on the free plan all repositories are public; if you want to make your repo private (which may be necessary to protect your intellectual property), you will have to upgrade to a paid account. This business model may not be sustainable forever given that other services, like Atlassian Bitbucket, offer private repos on their paid accounts, and for many businesses this may be a more compelling and cost-saving option.
- The search feature, although powerful, can be a bit frustratingly limited at times, such as when you are looking for a specific expression within the code of a repository.
- Because it is based on Git, an often challenging toolset with a steep learning curve for command-line users, it can be daunting for some users to wrap their heads around the concepts of version control, although to be fair GitHub does offer decent GUI applications to make this easier.
- It can be a bit too easy at times to make a critical error that writes over an earlier change to your code which can be difficult and confusing to fix.
Git back to contributing: Github to simply source control management
- Github user interface is fantastic for viewing differences between files housed in Github. The changes are clearly designated, and it provides options for a user's view preference.
- Github provides fantastic user and group management, including interfaces, allowing admins and team members to create different segments of people within an organization, and provide each segment, or each user, specific permissions.
- Github's API is robust, allowing for developers to create against all of Github's offerings quickly and easily.
- As any open source developer knows, when Github goes down, everything goes down. Github could provide better failover to prevent large periods of time time, although these are very infrequent currently.
- Some feature setups, like two factor authentication, are not abundantly clear during set up process. Some better instruction during the configuring of more advanced features could really benefit those new to Github.
- Filtering in Github, although robust and powerful, has a bit of a learning curve. A more clear interface for searching issues could provide more benefit to more parts of an organization, particularly non-technical staff.
If you are looking to store many files to be shared across a team, Github is probably a heavy handed solution, and the technical requirements of Github, however minimal, may provide a higher barrier to entry verses more traditional file sharing services.
More necessary than water?
- Pull request interface allows for code review, strengthening the engineering team culture and creating a way for junior developers to grow and become more productive.
- Having timelines of the code commits assists greatly in bug hunting.
- While working through a project, using GitHub to view the differences between an engineer's branch and master helps the engineer work efficiently and effectively.
- No real time chat functionality.
- No git best practices/tutorials.
- The search functionality is very primitive.
GitHub review - Start using version control !
- Inbuilt plugin for Visual Studio is a BIG factor, I have used another version control software at a company I interned at, and it was not as easy to follow. The plugin makes it easier since you can perform your activities visually, instead of the command line. Makes it easier for new users to get used to version control.
- The interface of GitHub plugin as well as the website itself is pretty straight forward.
- The student benefits offered via GitHub are a great idea! Will most definitely get a paid plan in the near future.
- Okay so installing the plugin for Visual Studio wasn't the most easy task. Required more work than I thought. Cannot remember the exact problems I faced but had a couple issues properly setting it up. A detailed guide from GitHub itself would be much appreciated.
- GitHub should invest in making university appearances and hold a couple info sessions. Could be more prominent in the classroom setting.
- Since they are so in touch with programmers (duh), a really simple monthly/weekly competition would be nice to garner interest in GitHub. It would also be nice since it will provide the impetus to users to work towards something, at the same time learning from the better programmers. The reward itself doesn't have to be anything major. I am basing this on the assumption that GitHub will be able to hold a well structured "contest" which introduces more aspects about version control.
- Start with the UI based style and then get into the command line interface. Gotta love DOS!
- Very useful with Visual Studio. Once you get it to work it's very very useful!
- Probably not best to use for confidential projects (even at a university) since you do not have many private repos.
- Need to get more experience to point out specific scenarios where it is inappropriate.
What's all the GitHub-ub about?
GitHub addresses accessibility within the team and organization, as it is able to function as a team's main code repository, as well as a great way to track issues stemming from the project. This was done by utilizing GitHub issues, another useful aspect which organized bugs, issues, enhancements, etc., in a way that was useful for the project team.
- Branch organization: This had allowed teams to review other team member features separately before merging any pending changes (via pull request) into the master branch. The visual given within GitHub makes it clear what changes were made and allowed for easy code review.
- Issue Tracking: The bug tracking in GitHub allows teams to keep track of the different issues presented by the team, with a timeline of changes and happenings within the application.
- Integration: Its integration with other tools like CircleCI and Slack have made it extremely useful in keeping the team up to date with the changes made within the system.
- Cleaner User Interface: The user interface could be a little bit more intuitive to users that do not know all of the features GitHub has to offer.
- Clear way to see changes not in a pull request, since you can see individual file history fairly easily, but not overall application file changes,
- Better user search: When adding members to a project, sometimes the search is not as well organized as it could be.
Github is essential for the modern developer
- Walk users through how to set up a new project easily.
- Allow repositories to have their own web pages/design to showcase open source software.
- Pleasant web interface for viewing pull request and comment threads.
- Weak code review process - there is no way to allow reviewers to formally "Approve" a pull request, nor add blocks which prevent a pull request from being merged until a minimum number of approvals are granted.
- Poor user experience to organize/save libraries of interest to reference later - users can only "Star" a repository to flag it to be searchable later.
- Private repositories are not free, unlike their competitors.