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Git vs Mercurial: What are the differences?
What is Git? Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system. Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
What is Mercurial? A distributed version control system. 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.
Git and Mercurial can be primarily classified as "Version Control System" tools.
"Distributed version control system" is the top reason why over 1441 developers like Git, while over 15 developers mention "Easy-to-grasp system with nice tools" as the leading cause for choosing Mercurial.
Git is an open source tool with 28.1K GitHub stars and 16.3K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Git's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Git has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3932 company stacks & 4776 developers stacks; compared to Mercurial, which is listed in 26 company stacks and 16 developer stacks.
SVN is much simpler than git for the simple stuff (checking in files and updating them when everyone's online), and much more complex than git for the complicated stuff (branching and merging). Or put another way, git's learning curve is steep up front, and then increases moderately as you do weird things; SVN's learning curve is very shallow up front and then increases rapidly.
If you're storing large files, if you're not branching, if you're not storing source code, and if your team is happy with SVN and the workflow you have, I'd say you should stay on SVN.
If you're writing source code with a relatively modern development practice (developers doing local builds and tests, pre-commit code reviews, preferably automated testing, preferably some amount of open-source code), you should move to git for two reasons: first, this style of working inherently requires frequent branching and merging, and second, your ability to interact with outside projects is easier if you're all comfortable with git instead of snapshotting the outside project into SVN.
Pros of Git
- Distributed version control system1.4K
- Efficient branching and merging1.1K
- Fast964
- Open source846
- Better than svn728
- Great command-line application368
- Simple306
- Free291
- Easy to use232
- Does not require server222
- Distributed27
- Small & Fast22
- Feature based workflow18
- Staging Area15
- Most wide-spread VSC13
- Disposable Experimentation11
- Role-based codelines11
- Frictionless Context Switching7
- Data Assurance6
- Efficient5
- Just awesome4
- Github integration3
- Easy branching and merging3
- Compatible2
- Possible to lose history and commits2
- Flexible2
- Team Integration1
- Easy1
- Light1
- Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system1
- Rebase supported natively; reflog; access to plumbing1
- Flexible, easy, Safe, and fast1
- CLI is great, but the GUI tools are awesome1
- It's what you do1
- Phinx0
Pros of Mercurial
- A lot easier to extend than git19
- 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
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Cons of Git
- Hard to learn16
- Inconsistent command line interface11
- Easy to lose uncommitted work9
- Worst documentation ever possibly made7
- Awful merge handling5
- Unexistent preventive security flows3
- Rebase hell3
- When --force is disabled, cannot rebase2
- Ironically even die-hard supporters screw up badly2
Cons of Mercurial
- Track single upstream only0
- Does not distinguish between local and remote head0