I don't think there's a decision to be made, aren't they different products and services? GitHub is traditionally an online repository based around Git versioning. GitHub have expanded into other things since Microsoft came in though. Nevertheless I recommend seriously taking the time to work through the very steep learning curve of setting up a local development environment. You could start by using Visual Studio Code and get a free GitHub account to push your private projects onto. If anything it'll be a free offsite backup of your work. You'll need to install Git to take care of your local repository as well as NPM and also look at Yarn. Have this on your priority list, do some research, gather links, tutorials, downloads etc and take a week out to get it done when you feel you're at the stage where you'd like to be more organised. You could start by trying VSCode see whether you like the features and using it as an editor. Look at other editors and so on.