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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Version Control
  4. Version Control System
  5. Git vs Plastic SCM vs SVN (Subversion)

Git vs Plastic SCM vs SVN (Subversion)

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

SVN (Subversion)
SVN (Subversion)
Stacks791
Followers629
Votes43
GitHub Stars614
Forks188
Git
Git
Stacks343.6K
Followers184.2K
Votes6.6K
GitHub Stars57.1K
Forks26.9K
Plastic SCM
Plastic SCM
Stacks40
Followers75
Votes17

Git vs Plastic SCM vs SVN (Subversion): What are the differences?

# Introduction

1. **Version Control Systems Comparison**:
   
2. **Ability to Handle Large Repositories**: Git has better performance in handling large repositories compared to Plastic SCM and SVN due to its distributed nature and lightweight branching and merging. Plastic SCM also offers good performance for large repositories through its distributed architecture. However, SVN can struggle with larger repositories as it is centralized and prone to performance issues.

3. **User Interface and User Experience**: Git and Plastic SCM offer better user interfaces and user experiences compared to SVN. Git's command-line interface is popular among developers, while Plastic SCM provides a user-friendly GUI. SVN, on the other hand, has a less intuitive user interface compared to the other two.

4. **Branching and Merging Capabilities**: Git is known for its powerful branching and merging capabilities, making it easier for developers to work on different features concurrently. Plastic SCM also offers robust branching and merging capabilities, but not as seamlessly integrated as Git. SVN lags behind in branching and merging functionality compared to both Git and Plastic SCM.

5. **Support for Large Files**: Git and Plastic SCM excel in handling large files efficiently, making them suitable for multimedia and large binary files. SVN, on the other hand, can struggle with large files due to its centralized architecture, which can lead to performance issues when dealing with such files.

6. **Community and Support**: Git has a vast and active community with extensive documentation and resources available for users. Plastic SCM also has a supportive community, but not as large as Git's. SVN, while being a popular choice in the past, has a smaller community compared to both Git and Plastic SCM, resulting in limited support and resources for users.

# Summary
In Summary, Git, Plastic SCM, and SVN differ in their performance with large repositories, user interfaces, branching and merging capabilities, handling of large files, and community support.

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Advice on SVN (Subversion), Git, Plastic SCM

Kamaldeep
Kamaldeep

CEO at Zhoustify Agency

Nov 13, 2020

Decided

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.

83.3k views83.3k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

SVN (Subversion)
SVN (Subversion)
Git
Git
Plastic SCM
Plastic SCM

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.

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.

Plastic SCM is a distributed version control designed for big projects. It excels on branching and merging, graphical user interfaces, and can also deal with large files and even file-locking (great for game devs). It includes "semantic" features like refactor detection to ease diffing complex refactors.

--
Distributed version control system;Branch Explorer;Semantic Version Control;Locking;Huge files;Big projects;GitSync;Super strong merging;Partial replica;ACL security;Database backends
Statistics
GitHub Stars
614
GitHub Stars
57.1K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
188
GitHub Forks
26.9K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
791
Stacks
343.6K
Stacks
40
Followers
629
Followers
184.2K
Followers
75
Votes
43
Votes
6.6K
Votes
17
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 20
    Easy to use
  • 13
    Simple code versioning
  • 5
    User/Access Management
  • 3
    Complicated code versionioning by Subversion
  • 2
    Free
Cons
  • 7
    Branching and tagging use tons of disk space
Pros
  • 1429
    Distributed version control system
  • 1053
    Efficient branching and merging
  • 959
    Fast
  • 843
    Open source
  • 726
    Better than svn
Cons
  • 16
    Hard to learn
  • 11
    Inconsistent command line interface
  • 9
    Easy to lose uncommitted work
  • 8
    Worst documentation ever possibly made
  • 5
    Awful merge handling
Pros
  • 8
    Wanna do Branch per Task Dev? Plastic rocks it
  • 4
    No Size limite
  • 2
    File Locking
  • 2
    Simple, easy to use interfaces. Resilient and solid
  • 1
    Very fast
Cons
  • 1
    Doesn't have file staging
  • 1
    No dark theme
  • 1
    Can't place windows next to each other to save space
  • 1
    Keyboard shortcuts are lacking
  • 1
    Adds files with only changed timestamp to pending
Integrations
No integrations availableNo integrations available
Gluon
Gluon
TeamCity
TeamCity
Jenkins
Jenkins
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio
Visual Studio

What are some alternatives to SVN (Subversion), Git, Plastic SCM?

Mercurial

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.

Pijul

Pijul

Pijul is a free and open source (AGPL 3) distributed version control system. Its distinctive feature is to be based on a sound theory of patches, which makes it easy to learn and use, and really distributed.

DVC

DVC

It is an open-source Version Control System for data science and machine learning projects. It is designed to handle large files, data sets, machine learning models, and metrics as well as code.

Magit

Magit

It is an interface to the version control system Git, implemented as an Emacs package. It aspires to be a complete Git porcelain. While we cannot (yet) claim that it wraps and improves upon each and every Git command, it is complete enough to allow even experienced Git users to perform almost all of their daily version control tasks directly from within Emacs. While many fine Git clients exist, only deserve to be called porcelains.

Replicate

Replicate

It lets you run machine learning models with a few lines of code, without needing to understand how machine learning works.

isomorphic-git

isomorphic-git

It is a pure JavaScript reimplementation of git that works in both Node.js and browser JavaScript environments. It can read and write to git repositories, fetch from and push to git remotes (such as GitHub), all without any native C++ module dependencies.

Gitless

Gitless

Gitless is an experiment to see what happens if you put a simple veneer on an app that changes the underlying concepts. Because Gitless is implemented on top of Git (could be considered what Git pros call a "porcelain" of Git), you can always fall back on Git.

Git Reflow

Git Reflow

Reflow automatically creates pull requests, ensures the code review is approved, and squash merges finished branches to master with a great commit message template.

BitKeeper

BitKeeper

BitKeeper is a fast, enterprise-ready, distributed SCM that scales up to very large projects and down to tiny ones.

Sapling SCM

Sapling SCM

It is a cross-platform, highly scalable, Git-compatible source control system. It aims to provide both user-friendly and powerful interfaces for users, as well as extreme scalability to deal with repositories containing many millions of files and many millions of commits.

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