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GitHub vs Stack Overflow: What are the differences?

Key Differences between GitHub and Stack Overflow

GitHub and Stack Overflow are both popular platforms in the field of software development and programming. While they have overlapping functionalities, they also have distinct differences that make each platform unique.

1. Integration of Code Repository vs. Q&A Platform: GitHub primarily serves as a code repository and version control system, allowing users to collaborate on projects, track changes, and manage code. It emphasizes on code hosting, error tracking, and project management. On the other hand, Stack Overflow is primarily a Q&A platform where developers can ask questions and get solutions from the community. It focuses on knowledge sharing, troubleshooting, and providing detailed answers to programming queries.

2. Collaboration and Project Management vs. Problem Solving: GitHub offers robust collaboration tools such as branching, merging, and pull requests, making it easier for teams to work together on codebases. It also provides project management features like issue tracking, milestones, and wikis to streamline the development process. Stack Overflow, on the other hand, focuses on problem-solving aspects, with a strong emphasis on providing answers, solutions, and insights to specific programming problems.

3. Code Hosting and Version Control vs. Community-driven Knowledge Sharing: GitHub excels in providing a dedicated platform for hosting code and version control, allowing developers to manage their codebases efficiently. With powerful Git integration, it supports distributed development workflows. Stack Overflow, on the contrary, relies on the expertise of the community members to answer queries and share knowledge. It has a reputation-based system, where users gain reputation points for valuable contributions, ensuring high-quality answers.

4. Public and Private Repositories vs. Public Q&A: GitHub allows developers to host both public and private repositories. Public repositories are visible and accessible to everyone, fostering open-source collaboration and community-driven development. Stack Overflow, however, is entirely public and focuses on Q&A interactions. The questions, answers, and discussions on Stack Overflow are accessible to everyone, encouraging transparency and knowledge dissemination.

5. Extensive Documentation vs. In-depth Discussions: GitHub offers extensive documentation capabilities, allowing developers to maintain README files, wiki pages, and project documentation, effectively showcasing project details and instructions. Stack Overflow focuses more on in-depth discussions around specific programming issues, where users can ask detailed questions and receive thorough answers with code snippets, screenshots, and relevant examples.

6. Focus on Code Review vs. Community Voting: GitHub emphasizes code reviews as an integral part of the development process. It provides features like pull requests and code comments, enabling team members to discuss and improve the codebase collaboratively. Stack Overflow, on the other hand, relies on a community voting system, where users can upvote/downvote questions and answers based on their usefulness. This mechanism ensures valuable content surfaces, and irrelevant or incorrect information is appropriately filtered.

In summary, GitHub is primarily focused on code hosting, version control, and collaboration, whereas Stack Overflow serves as a Q&A platform with a strong emphasis on knowledge sharing and problem-solving within the developer community.

Decisions about GitHub and Stack Overflow
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 · 698.4K 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 GitHub
Pros of Stack Overflow
  • 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
  • 487
    Great community
  • 483
    Remote team collaboration
  • 449
    Great way to share
  • 442
    Pull request and features planning
  • 147
    Just works
  • 132
    Integrated in many tools
  • 122
    Free Public Repos
  • 116
    Github Gists
  • 113
    Github pages
  • 83
    Easy to find repos
  • 62
    Open source
  • 60
    Easy to find projects
  • 60
    It's free
  • 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
    Standard in Open Source collab
  • 10
    Newsfeed
  • 8
    Fast
  • 8
    Beautiful user experience
  • 8
    It integrates directly with Hipchat
  • 7
    Easy to discover new code libraries
  • 6
    Smooth integration
  • 6
    Integrations
  • 6
    Graphs
  • 6
    Nice API
  • 6
    It's awesome
  • 6
    Cloud SCM
  • 5
    Quick Onboarding
  • 5
    Remarkable uptime
  • 5
    CI Integration
  • 5
    Reliable
  • 5
    Hands down best online Git service available
  • 4
    Version Control
  • 4
    Unlimited Public Repos at no cost
  • 4
    Simple but powerful
  • 4
    Loved by developers
  • 4
    Free HTML hosting
  • 4
    Uses GIT
  • 4
    Security options
  • 4
    Easy to use and collaborate with others
  • 3
    Easy deployment via SSH
  • 3
    Ci
  • 3
    IAM
  • 3
    Nice to use
  • 2
    Easy and efficient maintainance of the projects
  • 2
    Beautiful
  • 2
    Self Hosted
  • 2
    Issues tracker
  • 2
    Easy source control and everything is backed up
  • 2
    Never dethroned
  • 2
    All in one development service
  • 2
    Good tools support
  • 2
    Free HTML hostings
  • 2
    IAM integration
  • 2
    Very Easy to Use
  • 2
    Easy to use
  • 2
    Leads the copycats
  • 2
    Free private repos
  • 1
    Profound
  • 1
    Dasf
  • 257
    Scary smart community
  • 206
    Knows all
  • 142
    Voting system
  • 134
    Good questions
  • 83
    Good SEO
  • 22
    Addictive
  • 14
    Tight focus
  • 10
    Share and gain knowledge
  • 7
    Useful
  • 3
    Fast loading
  • 2
    Gamification
  • 1
    Knows everyone
  • 1
    Experts share experience and answer questions
  • 1
    Stack overflow to developers As google to net surfers
  • 1
    Questions answered quickly
  • 1
    No annoying ads
  • 1
    No spam
  • 1
    Fast community response
  • 1
    Good moderators
  • 1
    Quick answers from users
  • 1
    Good answers
  • 1
    User reputation ranking
  • 1
    Efficient answers
  • 1
    Leading developer community

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Cons of GitHub
Cons of Stack Overflow
  • 55
    Owned by micrcosoft
  • 38
    Expensive for lone developers that want private repos
  • 15
    Relatively slow product/feature release cadence
  • 10
    API scoping could be better
  • 9
    Only 3 collaborators for private repos
  • 4
    Limited featureset for issue management
  • 3
    Does not have a graph for showing history like git lens
  • 2
    GitHub Packages does not support SNAPSHOT versions
  • 1
    No multilingual interface
  • 1
    Takes a long time to commit
  • 1
    Expensive
  • 3
    Not welcoming to newbies
  • 3
    Unfair downvoting
  • 3
    Unfriendly moderators
  • 3
    No opinion based questions
  • 3
    Mean users
  • 2
    Limited to types of questions it can accept

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

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.

What is Stack Overflow?

Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming.

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What companies use GitHub?
What companies use Stack Overflow?
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What tools integrate with GitHub?
What tools integrate with Stack Overflow?

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What are some alternatives to GitHub and Stack Overflow?
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.
AWS CodeCommit
CodeCommit eliminates the need to operate your own source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure. You can use CodeCommit to securely store anything from source code to binaries, and it works seamlessly with your existing Git tools.
Git
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.
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.
See all alternatives