What is Git and what are its top alternatives?
Git is a widely used distributed version control system that allows multiple developers to collaborate on projects efficiently. Its key features include branching and merging, speed, scalability, and data integrity. However, Git has a learning curve for beginners and can be complex to use for some users.
- Mercurial: Mercurial is a distributed version control system that offers similar features to Git. Key features include distributed development, easy branching and merging, and performance. Pros: easier learning curve than Git, strong support for Windows. Cons: smaller community compared to Git.
- SVN (Apache Subversion): SVN is a centralized version control system that is known for its simplicity and ease of use. Key features include atomic commits, branching and tagging. Pros: simple to use, strong support for binary files. Cons: lacks some advanced features of Git, slower performance for large repositories.
- Perforce: Perforce is a centralized version control system commonly used in enterprise settings. Key features include support for large files and repositories, fine-grained access control, and integration with CI/CD tools. Pros: strong support for large projects, enterprise-grade security. Cons: expensive for smaller teams, complex setup and administration.
- Fossil: Fossil is a distributed version control system that includes bug tracking and wiki features. Key features include built-in web interface, self-contained executable, and easy setup. Pros: all-in-one solution for version control and project management, simple setup. Cons: limited scalability for very large projects, smaller user base compared to Git.
- Bazaar: Bazaar is a distributed version control system developed by Canonical. Key features include focus on ease of use, multiple workflows supported, and extensible with plugins. Pros: easy to learn, flexible workflows, powerful branching and merging. Cons: slower performance compared to Git, smaller community support.
- Plastic SCM: Plastic SCM is a distributed version control system designed for tracking changes in large and complex projects. Key features include branching visualization, merge tracking, and scalability. Pros: strong support for large projects, robust branching and merging capabilities. Cons: complex setup, expensive for enterprise use.
- SourceGear Vault: SourceGear Vault is a centralized version control system known for its reliability and ease of use. Key features include atomic commits, visual differencing tools, and user-friendly interface. Pros: simple to use, reliable performance. Cons: limited feature set compared to Git, lacks strong support for distributed workflows.
- Bitbucket: Bitbucket is a web-based version control system that supports both Git and Mercurial repositories. Key features include code collaboration, pull requests, and continuous integration. Pros: integration with other Atlassian products, free for small teams. Cons: limited support for large projects, slower performance compared to self-hosted Git.
- AWS CodeCommit: AWS CodeCommit is a managed version control service that supports Git repositories. Key features include scalability, high availability, and integration with AWS services. Pros: fully managed service, integrates with AWS ecosystem. Cons: limited features compared to Git, higher cost for large repositories.
- Darcs: Darcs is a distributed version control system known for its advanced features like patch theory and interactive patch management. Key features include offline commits, cherry-picking changes, and conflict resolution tools. Pros: innovative approach to version control, strong support for non-linear workflows. Cons: slower performance for large repositories, smaller user base than Git.
Top Alternatives to Git
- GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together. ...
- SVN (Subversion)
Subversion exists to be universally recognized and adopted as an open-source, centralized version control system characterized by its reliability as a safe haven for valuable data; the simplicity of its model and usage; and its ability to support the needs of a wide variety of users and projects, from individuals to large-scale enterprise operations. ...
- Bitbucket
Bitbucket gives teams one place to plan projects, collaborate on code, test and deploy, all with free private Git repositories. Teams choose Bitbucket because it has a superior Jira integration, built-in CI/CD, & is free for up to 5 users. ...
- Perforce
Visibility, access control, workflow and code management for Git environments. Flexibility of collaborating on the same codebase and code reviews using any combination of Perforce and Git workflows and tools without compromise. ...
- Mercurial
Mercurial is dedicated to speed and efficiency with a sane user interface. It is written in Python. Mercurial's implementation and data structures are designed to be fast. You can generate diffs between revisions, or jump back in time within seconds. ...
- GitLab
GitLab offers git repository management, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds and wikis. Enterprises install GitLab on-premise and connect it with LDAP and Active Directory servers for secure authentication and authorization. A single GitLab server can handle more than 25,000 users but it is also possible to create a high availability setup with multiple active servers. ...
- Git Flow
It provides excellent command line help and output. It is a merge based solution. It doesn't rebase feature branches. ...
Git alternatives & related posts
GitHub
- Open source friendly1.8K
- Easy source control1.5K
- Nice UI1.3K
- Great for team collaboration1.1K
- Easy setup867
- Issue tracker504
- Great community487
- Remote team collaboration483
- Great way to share449
- Pull request and features planning442
- Just works147
- Integrated in many tools132
- Free Public Repos122
- Github Gists116
- Github pages113
- Easy to find repos83
- Open source62
- Easy to find projects60
- It's free60
- Network effect56
- Extensive API49
- Organizations43
- Branching42
- Developer Profiles34
- Git Powered Wikis32
- Great for collaboration30
- It's fun24
- Clean interface and good integrations23
- Community SDK involvement22
- Learn from others source code20
- Because: Git16
- It integrates directly with Azure14
- Standard in Open Source collab10
- Newsfeed10
- Fast8
- Beautiful user experience8
- It integrates directly with Hipchat8
- Easy to discover new code libraries7
- Smooth integration6
- Integrations6
- Graphs6
- Nice API6
- It's awesome6
- Cloud SCM6
- Quick Onboarding5
- Remarkable uptime5
- CI Integration5
- Reliable5
- Hands down best online Git service available5
- Version Control4
- Unlimited Public Repos at no cost4
- Simple but powerful4
- Loved by developers4
- Free HTML hosting4
- Uses GIT4
- Security options4
- Easy to use and collaborate with others4
- Easy deployment via SSH3
- Ci3
- IAM3
- Nice to use3
- Easy and efficient maintainance of the projects2
- Beautiful2
- Self Hosted2
- Issues tracker2
- Easy source control and everything is backed up2
- Never dethroned2
- All in one development service2
- Good tools support2
- Free HTML hostings2
- IAM integration2
- Very Easy to Use2
- Easy to use2
- Leads the copycats2
- Free private repos2
- Profound1
- Dasf1
- Owned by micrcosoft55
- Expensive for lone developers that want private repos38
- Relatively slow product/feature release cadence15
- API scoping could be better10
- Only 3 collaborators for private repos9
- Limited featureset for issue management4
- Does not have a graph for showing history like git lens3
- GitHub Packages does not support SNAPSHOT versions2
- No multilingual interface1
- Takes a long time to commit1
- Expensive1
related GitHub posts
I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.
I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!
I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.
Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.
Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.
With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.
If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.
Context: I wanted to create an end to end IoT data pipeline simulation in Google Cloud IoT Core and other GCP services. I never touched Terraform meaningfully until working on this project, and it's one of the best explorations in my development career. The documentation and syntax is incredibly human-readable and friendly. I'm used to building infrastructure through the google apis via Python , but I'm so glad past Sung did not make that decision. I was tempted to use Google Cloud Deployment Manager, but the templates were a bit convoluted by first impression. I'm glad past Sung did not make this decision either.
Solution: Leveraging Google Cloud Build Google Cloud Run Google Cloud Bigtable Google BigQuery Google Cloud Storage Google Compute Engine along with some other fun tools, I can deploy over 40 GCP resources using Terraform!
Check Out My Architecture: CLICK ME
Check out the GitHub repo attached
- Easy to use20
- Simple code versioning13
- User/Access Management5
- Complicated code versionioning by Subversion3
- Free2
- Branching and tagging use tons of disk space7
related SVN (Subversion) posts
I use Visual Studio Code because at this time is a mature software and I can do practically everything using it.
It's free and open source: The project is hosted on GitHub and it’s free to download, fork, modify and contribute to the project.
Multi-platform: You can download binaries for different platforms, included Windows (x64), MacOS and Linux (
.rpm
and.deb
packages)LightWeight: It runs smoothly in different devices. It has an average memory and CPU usage. Starts almost immediately and it’s very stable.
Extended language support: Supports by default the majority of the most used languages and syntax like JavaScript, HTML, C#, Swift, Java, PHP, Python and others. Also, VS Code supports different file types associated to projects like
.ini
,.properties
, XML and JSON files.Integrated tools: Includes an integrated terminal, debugger, problem list and console output inspector. The project navigator sidebar is simple and powerful: you can manage your files and folders with ease. The command palette helps you find commands by text. The search widget has a powerful auto-complete feature to search and find your files.
Extensible and configurable: There are many extensions available for every language supported, including syntax highlighters, IntelliSense and code completion, and debuggers. There are also extension to manage application configuration and architecture like Docker and Jenkins.
Integrated with Git: You can visually manage your project repositories, pull, commit and push your changes, and easy conflict resolution.( there is support for SVN (Subversion) users by plugin)
I use Git instead of SVN (Subversion) because it allows us to scale our development team. At any given time, the Zulip open source project has hundreds of open pull requests from tens of contributors, each in various stages of the pipeline. Git's workflow makes it very easy to context switch between different feature branches.
Bitbucket
- Free private repos905
- Simple setup397
- Nice ui and tools349
- Unlimited private repositories342
- Affordable git hosting240
- Integrates with many apis and services123
- Reliable uptime119
- Nice gui87
- Pull requests and code reviews85
- Very customisable58
- Mercurial repositories16
- SourceTree integration14
- JIRA integration12
- Track every commit to an issue in JIRA10
- Deployment hooks8
- Best free alternative to Github8
- Automatically share repositories with all your teammates7
- Source Code Insight7
- Compatible with Mac and Windows7
- Price6
- Login with Google5
- Create a wiki5
- Approve pull request button5
- Customizable pipelines4
- #2 Atlassian Product after JIRA4
- Unlimited Private Repos at no cost3
- Also supports Mercurial3
- Continuous Integration and Delivery3
- Mercurial Support2
- Multilingual interface2
- Teamcity2
- Open source friendly2
- Issues tracker2
- IAM2
- Academic license program2
- IAM integration2
- Not much community activity19
- Difficult to review prs because of confusing ui17
- Quite buggy15
- Managed by enterprise Java company10
- CI tool is not free of charge8
- Complexity with rights management7
- Only 5 collaborators for private repos6
- Slow performance4
- No AWS Codepipelines integration2
- No more Mercurial repositories1
- No server side git-hook support1
related Bitbucket posts
I use GitLab when building side-projects and MVPs. The interface and interactions are close enough to those of GitHub to prevent cognitive switching costs between professional and personal projects hosted on different services.
GitLab also provides a suite of tools including issue/project management, CI/CD with GitLab CI, and validation/landing pages with GitLab Pages. With everything in one place, on an #OpenSourceCloud GitLab makes it easy for me to manage much larger projects on my own, than would be possible with other solutions or tools.
It's petty I know, but I can also read the GitLab code diffs far more easily than diffs on GitHub or Bitbucket...they just look better in my opinion.
A bit difference in GitHub and GitLab though both are Version Control repository management services which provides key component in the software development workflow. A decision of choosing GitHub over GitLab is major leap extension from code management, to deployment and monitoring alongside looking beyond the code base hosting provided best fitted tools for developer communities.
- Authentication stages - With GitLab you can set and modify people’s permissions according to their role. In GitHub, you can decide if someone gets a read or write access to a repository.
- Built-In Continuous Integrations - GitLab offers its very own CI for free. No need to use an external CI service. And if you are already used to an external CI, you can obviously integrate with Jenkins, etc whereas GitHub offers various 3rd party integrations – such as Travis CI, CircleCI or Codeship – for running and testing your code. However, there’s no built-in CI solution at the moment.
- Import/Export Resources - GitLab offers detailed documentation on how to import your data from other vendors – such as GitHub, Bitbucket to GitLab. GitHub, on the other hand, does not offer such detailed documentation for the most common git repositories. However, GitHub offers to use GitHub Importer if you have your source code in Subversion, Mercurial, TFS and others.
Also when it comes to exporting data, GitLab seems to do a pretty solid job, offering you the ability to export your projects including the following data:
- Wiki and project repositories
- Project uploads
- The configuration including webhooks and services
- Issues with comments, merge requests with diffs and comments, labels, milestones, snippets, and other project entities.
GitHub, on the other hand, seems to be more restrictive when it comes to export features of existing GitHub repositories. * Integrations - #githubmarketplace gives you an essence to have multiple and competitive integrations whereas you will find less in the GitLab.
So go ahead with better understanding.
- Powerful3
- Great for Enterprise level use3
- Robust2
- Scalable1
related Perforce posts
- A lot easier to extend than git18
- Easy-to-grasp system with nice tools17
- Works on windows natively without cygwin nonsense13
- Written in python11
- Free9
- Fast8
- Better than Git6
- Best GUI6
- Better than svn4
- Hg inc2
- Good user experience2
- TortoiseHg - Unified free gui for all platforms2
- Consistent UI2
- Easy-to-use2
- Native support to all platforms2
- Free to use1
- Track single upstream only0
- Does not distinguish between local and remote head0
related Mercurial posts
I've been excited about Git ever since it got a built-in UI. It's the perfect combination of a really solid, simple data model, which allows an experienced user to predict precisely what a Git subcommand will do, often without needing to read the documentation (see the slides linked from the attached article for details). Most important to me as the lead developer of a large open source project (Zulip) is that it makes it possible to build a really clean, clear development history that I regularly use to understand details of our code history that are critical to making correct changes.
And it performs really, really well. In 2014, I managed Dropbox's migration from Mercurial to Git. And just switching tools made just about every common operation (git status
, git log
, git commit
etc.) 2-10x faster than with Mercurial. It makes sense if you think about it, since Git was designed to perform well with Linux, one of the largest open source projects out there, but it was still a huge productivity increase that we got basically for free.
If you're learning Git, I highly recommend reading the other sections of Zulip's Git Guide; we get a lot of positive feedback from developers on it being a useful resource even for their projects unrelated to Zulip.
- Self hosted508
- Free431
- Has community edition339
- Easy setup242
- Familiar interface240
- Includes many features, including ci137
- Nice UI113
- Good integration with gitlabci84
- Simple setup57
- Has an official mobile app35
- Free private repository34
- Continuous Integration31
- Open source, great ui (like github)23
- Slack Integration18
- Full CI flow15
- Free and unlimited private git repos11
- All in one (Git, CI, Agile..)10
- User, group, and project access management is simple10
- Intuitive UI8
- Built-in CI8
- Full DevOps suite with Git6
- Both public and private Repositories6
- Integrated Docker Registry5
- So easy to use5
- CI5
- Build/pipeline definition alongside code5
- It's powerful source code management tool5
- Dockerized4
- It's fully integrated4
- On-premises4
- Security and Stable4
- Unlimited free repos & collaborators4
- Not Microsoft Owned4
- Excellent4
- Issue system4
- Mattermost Chat client4
- Great for team collaboration3
- Free private repos3
- Because is the best remote host for git repositories3
- Built-in Docker Registry3
- Opensource3
- Low maintenance cost due omnibus-deployment3
- I like the its runners and executors feature3
- Beautiful2
- Groups of groups2
- Multilingual interface2
- Powerful software planning and maintaining tools2
- Review Apps feature2
- Kubernetes integration with GitLab CI2
- One-click install through DigitalOcean2
- Powerful Continuous Integration System2
- It includes everything I need, all packaged with docker2
- The dashboard with deployed environments2
- HipChat intergration2
- Many private repo2
- Kubernetes Integration2
- Published IP list for whitelisting (gl-infra#434)2
- Wounderful2
- Native CI2
- Supports Radius/Ldap & Browser Code Edits1
- Slow ui performance28
- Introduce breaking bugs every release9
- Insecure (no published IP list for whitelisting)6
- Built-in Docker Registry2
- Review Apps feature1
related GitLab posts
I have mixed feelings on GitHub as a product and our use of it for the Zulip open source project. On the one hand, I do feel that being on GitHub helps people discover Zulip, because we have enough stars (etc.) that we rank highly among projects on the platform. and there is a definite benefit for lowering barriers to contribution (which is important to us) that GitHub has such a dominant position in terms of what everyone has accounts with.
But even ignoring how one might feel about their new corporate owner (MicroSoft), in a lot of ways GitHub is a bad product for open source projects. Years after the "Dear GitHub" letter, there are still basic gaps in its issue tracker:
- You can't give someone permission to label/categorize issues without full write access to a project (including ability to merge things to master, post releases, etc.).
- You can't let anyone with a GitHub account self-assign issues to themselves.
- Many more similar issues.
It's embarrassing, because I've talked to GitHub product managers at various open source events about these things for 3 years, and they always agree the thing is important, but then nothing ever improves in the Issues product. Maybe the new management at MicroSoft will fix their product management situation, but if not, I imagine we'll eventually do the migration to GitLab.
We have a custom bot project, http://github.com/zulip/zulipbot, to deal with some of these issues where possible, and every other large project we talk to does the same thing, more or less.
We use GitLab CI because of the great native integration as a part of the GitLab framework and the linting-capabilities it offers. The visualization of complex pipelines and the embedding within the project overview made Gitlab CI even more convenient. We use it for all projects, all deployments and as a part of GitLab Pages.
While we initially used the Shell-executor, we quickly switched to the Docker-executor and use it exclusively now.
We formerly used Jenkins but preferred to handle everything within GitLab . Aside from the unification of our infrastructure another motivation was the "configuration-in-file"-approach, that Gitlab CI offered, while Jenkins support of this concept was very limited and users had to resort to using the webinterface. Since the file is included within the repository, it is also version controlled, which was a huge plus for us.
- Performance68
- Low-level49
- Portability36
- Hardware level29
- Embedded apps19
- Pure13
- Performance of assembler9
- Ubiquity8
- Great for embedded6
- Compiles quickly4
- Old4
- No garbage collection to slow it down3
- Gnu/linux interoperable2
- OpenMP2
- Low-level5
- No built in support for parallelism (e.g. map-reduce)3
- Lack of type safety3
- No built in support for concurrency3
related C lang posts
Why Uber developed H3, our open source grid system to make geospatial data visualization and exploration easier and more efficient:
We decided to create H3 to combine the benefits of a hexagonal global grid system with a hierarchical indexing system. A global grid system usually requires at least two things: a map projection and a grid laid on top of the map. For map projection, we chose to use gnomonic projections centered on icosahedron faces. This projects from Earth as a sphere to an icosahedron, a twenty-sided platonic solid. The H3 grid is constructed by laying out 122 base cells over the Earth, with ten cells per face. H3 supports sixteen resolutions: https://eng.uber.com/h3/
(GitHub Pages : https://uber.github.io/h3/#/ Written in C w/ bindings in Java & JavaScript )
One important decision for delivering a platform independent solution with low memory footprint and minimal dependencies was the choice of the programming language. We considered a few from Python (there was already a reasonably large Python code base at Thumbtack), to Go (we were taking our first steps with it), and even Rust (too immature at the time).
We ended up writing it in C. It was easy to meet all requirements with only one external dependency for implementing the web server, clearly no challenges running it on any of the Linux distributions we were maintaining, and arguably the implementation with the smallest memory footprint given the choices above.