Gerrit Code Review vs GitHub

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Gerrit Code Review

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GitHub

277.7K
241.4K
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10.3K
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Gerrit Code Review vs GitHub: What are the differences?

Introduction

Gerrit Code Review and GitHub are both popular code collaboration platforms used by developers. While they share some similarities, there are key differences between the two. In this article, we will explore the main differences between Gerrit Code Review and GitHub.

1. Access Control

Gerrit Code Review provides a powerful access control system, allowing administrators to define fine-grained permissions for different actions on the codebase. This includes the ability to set up pre-commit code reviews, ensuring that no code makes it into the repository without thorough review. On the other hand, GitHub's access control options are more limited, mainly revolving around repository-level permissions.

2. Workflow

Gerrit Code Review is often used in conjunction with Git, providing a workflow that revolves around code reviews before merging changes into the main repository. It enforces a strict process for submitting changes, involving code reviews, feedback, and approvals. GitHub, on the other hand, follows a more flexible workflow, allowing developers to work directly with branches and easily merge changes into the main branch.

3. Integration with CI/CD

Gerrit Code Review provides seamless integration with various continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) systems. It allows developers to trigger automated tests and builds based on code changes, ensuring that the code is always in a deployable state. GitHub also supports CI/CD integration, but the level of control and customization is more limited compared to Gerrit Code Review.

4. Code Collaboration Features

GitHub offers a rich set of collaboration features, such as pull requests, issues tracking, and project management tools. These features facilitate communication and collaboration among team members, making it easy to discuss changes, track progress, and manage tasks. While Gerrit Code Review does offer some collaboration features, such as inline commenting, it doesn't provide the same level of comprehensive collaboration tools as GitHub.

5. Community and Ecosystem

GitHub has a vibrant and large community, making it easy to discover and contribute to open-source projects. It offers a wide range of third-party integrations, plugins, and extensions, allowing developers to customize and extend their workflows. Gerrit Code Review, on the other hand, has a smaller community and a more limited ecosystem in terms of integrations and extensions.

6. Code Ownership

Gerrit Code Review emphasizes code ownership by associating each change with a specific reviewer. This means that there is a clear accountability for code quality, as each change has a designated reviewer responsible for reviewing and approving it. In GitHub, while reviewers can be assigned to pull requests, there is less emphasis on explicit code ownership.

In summary, Gerrit Code Review offers a more structured and controlled approach to code collaboration, with powerful access control, strict workflows, and seamless CI/CD integrations. On the other hand, GitHub provides a more flexible and feature-rich environment for code collaboration, with a larger community and a wider range of collaboration tools.

Decisions about Gerrit Code Review and GitHub
Weverton Timoteo

Do you review your Pull/Merge Request before assigning Reviewers?

If you work in a team opening a Pull Request (or Merge Request) looks appropriate. However, have you ever thought about opening a Pull/Merge Request when working by yourself? Here's a checklist of things you can review in your own:

  • Pick the correct target branch
  • Make Drafts explicit
  • Name things properly
  • Ask help for tools
  • Remove the noise
  • Fetch necessary data
  • Understand Mergeability
  • Pass the message
  • Add screenshots
  • Be found in the future
  • Comment inline in your changes

Read the blog post for more detailed explanation for each item :D

What else do you review before asking for code review?

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Weverton Timoteo

Using an inclusive language is crucial for fostering a diverse culture. Git has changed the naming conventions to be more language-inclusive, and so you should change. Our development tools, like GitHub and GitLab, already supports the change.

SourceLevel deals very nicely with repositories that changed the master branch to a more appropriate word. Besides, you can use the grep linter the look for exclusive terms contained in the source code.

As the inclusive language gap may happen in other aspects of our lives, have you already thought about them?

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Weverton Timoteo

One of the magic tricks git performs is the ability to rewrite log history. You can do it in many ways, but git rebase -i is the one I most use. With this command, It’s possible to switch commits order, remove a commit, squash two or more commits, or edit, for instance.

It’s particularly useful to run it before opening a pull request. It allows developers to “clean up” the mess and organize commits before submitting to review. If you follow the practice 3 and 4, then the list of commits should look very similar to a task list. It should reveal the rationale you had, telling the story of how you end up with that final code.

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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 8 upvotes · 650K views

Out of most of the VCS solutions out there, we found Gitlab was the most feature complete with a free community edition. Their DevSecops offering is also a very robust solution. Gitlab CI/CD was quite easy to setup and the direct integration with your VCS + CI/CD is also a bonus. Out of the box integration with major cloud providers, alerting through instant messages etc. are all extremely convenient. We push our CI/CD updates to MS Teams.

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Gitlab as A LOT of features that GitHub and Azure DevOps are missing. Even if both GH and Azure are backed by Microsoft, GitLab being open source has a faster upgrade rate and the hosted by gitlab.com solution seems more appealing than anything else! Quick win: the UI is way better and the Pipeline is way easier to setup on GitLab!

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Nazar Atamaniuk
Shared insights
on
DeployPlaceDeployPlaceGitHubGitHubGitLabGitLab

At DeployPlace we use self-hosted GitLab, we have chosen GitLab as most of us are familiar with it. We are happy with all features GitLab provides, I can’t imagine our life without integrated GitLab CI. Another important feature for us is integrated code review tool, we use it every day, we use merge requests, code reviews, branching. To be honest, most of us have GitHub accounts as well, we like to contribute in open source, and we want to be a part of the tech community, but lack of solutions from GitHub in the area of CI doesn’t let us chose it for our projects.

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Pros of Gerrit Code Review
Pros of GitHub
  • 13
    Code review
  • 11
    Good workflow
  • 10
    Cleaner repository story
  • 9
    Open source
  • 9
    Good integration with Jenkins
  • 5
    Unlimited repo support
  • 2
    Comparison dashboard
  • 1.8K
    Open source friendly
  • 1.5K
    Easy source control
  • 1.3K
    Nice UI
  • 1.1K
    Great for team collaboration
  • 867
    Easy setup
  • 504
    Issue tracker
  • 486
    Great community
  • 482
    Remote team collaboration
  • 451
    Great way to share
  • 442
    Pull request and features planning
  • 147
    Just works
  • 132
    Integrated in many tools
  • 121
    Free Public Repos
  • 116
    Github Gists
  • 112
    Github pages
  • 83
    Easy to find repos
  • 62
    Open source
  • 60
    It's free
  • 60
    Easy to find projects
  • 56
    Network effect
  • 49
    Extensive API
  • 43
    Organizations
  • 42
    Branching
  • 34
    Developer Profiles
  • 32
    Git Powered Wikis
  • 30
    Great for collaboration
  • 24
    It's fun
  • 23
    Clean interface and good integrations
  • 22
    Community SDK involvement
  • 20
    Learn from others source code
  • 16
    Because: Git
  • 14
    It integrates directly with Azure
  • 10
    Newsfeed
  • 10
    Standard in Open Source collab
  • 8
    Fast
  • 8
    It integrates directly with Hipchat
  • 8
    Beautiful user experience
  • 7
    Easy to discover new code libraries
  • 6
    Smooth integration
  • 6
    Cloud SCM
  • 6
    Nice API
  • 6
    Graphs
  • 6
    Integrations
  • 6
    It's awesome
  • 5
    Quick Onboarding
  • 5
    Remarkable uptime
  • 5
    CI Integration
  • 5
    Hands down best online Git service available
  • 5
    Reliable
  • 4
    Free HTML hosting
  • 4
    Version Control
  • 4
    Simple but powerful
  • 4
    Unlimited Public Repos at no cost
  • 4
    Security options
  • 4
    Loved by developers
  • 4
    Uses GIT
  • 4
    Easy to use and collaborate with others
  • 3
    IAM
  • 3
    Nice to use
  • 3
    Ci
  • 3
    Easy deployment via SSH
  • 2
    Good tools support
  • 2
    Leads the copycats
  • 2
    Free private repos
  • 2
    Free HTML hostings
  • 2
    Easy and efficient maintainance of the projects
  • 2
    Beautiful
  • 2
    Never dethroned
  • 2
    IAM integration
  • 2
    Very Easy to Use
  • 2
    Easy to use
  • 2
    All in one development service
  • 2
    Self Hosted
  • 2
    Issues tracker
  • 2
    Easy source control and everything is backed up
  • 1
    Profound

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Gerrit Code Review
Cons of GitHub
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 53
      Owned by micrcosoft
    • 37
      Expensive for lone developers that want private repos
    • 15
      Relatively slow product/feature release cadence
    • 10
      API scoping could be better
    • 8
      Only 3 collaborators for private repos
    • 3
      Limited featureset for issue management
    • 2
      GitHub Packages does not support SNAPSHOT versions
    • 2
      Does not have a graph for showing history like git lens
    • 1
      No multilingual interface
    • 1
      Takes a long time to commit
    • 1
      Expensive

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is Gerrit Code Review?

    Gerrit is a self-hosted pre-commit code review tool. It serves as a Git hosting server with option to comment incoming changes. It is highly configurable and extensible with default guarding policies, webhooks, project access control and more.

    What is 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.

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    Jobs that mention Gerrit Code Review and GitHub as a desired skillset
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    See which teams inside your own company are using Gerrit Code Review or GitHub.
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    What tools integrate with Gerrit Code Review?
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    What are some alternatives to Gerrit Code Review and GitHub?
    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.
    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.
    ESLint
    A pluggable and configurable linter tool for identifying and reporting on patterns in JavaScript. Maintain your code quality with ease.
    Prettier
    Prettier is an opinionated code formatter. It enforces a consistent style by parsing your code and re-printing it with its own rules that take the maximum line length into account, wrapping code when necessary.
    TSLint
    An extensible static analysis tool that checks TypeScript code for readability, maintainability, and functionality errors. It is widely supported across modern editors & build systems and can be customized with your own lint rules, configurations, and formatters.
    See all alternatives