Github, the industry standard in version control and project collaboration
Updated February 09, 2020

Github, the industry standard in version control and project collaboration

Eric Mason | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with GitHub

We use Github extensively for version control and team collaboration in all of our development/architecture projects. It's primarily used by our product team but we also use it to share information with the success team and collect feedback. Github assists us in the process of code reviews and is a powerful tool when managing/deploying multiple simultaneous projects.

Pros

  • Version Control: GitHub, being built over Git, makes it fast and easy to develop projects in versions/branches and easily rollback to previous versions when necessary.
  • Pull Requests/Review: GitHub has a powerful UI for creating pull requests, with useful tools like inline commenting and more recently "suggested changes". Pull request history is always maintained and easy to search.
  • Collaboration/Auditing: It's easy for multiple team members to work on the same project and merge changes (often) seamlessly. All contributions are tracked so it's easy to identify contributors.
  • Industry Standard: GitHub is used by virtually all major open source projects so it's very easy to find and contribute to projects of interest if you're well versed with GitHub.

Cons

  • Reviewing large pull requests can be tedious and it can be tough to identify recent changes (e.g. a one line change) in new files or files with lots of changes.
  • It should be a bit harder to push unresolved merge conflicts, we've had these slip through once in awhile.
  • You have to be careful with merge operations; a bad merge can be painful to reverse.
  • GitHub reduces regressions by providing plenty of automated CI tools, which in turn has a positive impact on ROI by reducing end user bugs.
  • GitHub reduces the amount of developer time required to share code/collaborate, again improving ROI.
  • We really haven't experience anything that could be considered to have had a negative impact on ROI; perhaps the rare case where we get a bad merge that's difficult/time consuming to revert.
Before switching to GitHub we used Apache Subversion, but found GitHub was better in virtually every way. When we used subversion in 2011 (albeit things might have changed by now) creating and working on separate branches was tedious. We had to create a bunch of different branches and keep track of who was working on each. Merges were slow as were most other activities.
I honestly can't see a better alternative to GitHub. It's competitors may have similar features now, but Github far more widely used and continues to evolve and add powerful features. Outside of work, from a hobbyist perspective it was also nice to see them open the use of private repos and reasonable usage limits. I continue to be impressed by the speed and ease of use provided by GitHub.

Do you think GitHub delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with GitHub's feature set?

Yes

Did GitHub live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of GitHub go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy GitHub again?

Yes

Situations where Github is well suited:
- Pretty much any development project (solo or as a team, it's always useful to have backups/project history; you never need to worry about losing your work if you commit/push regularly)
- Projects involving multiple collaborators with and a structured text-based syntax

Situation where Github is less appropriate:
- It's less useful for situations where you have multiple collaborators working on written/formatted reports; I've found Git can produce some nasty merge conflicts in these situations

Comments

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