GitHub vs. Perforce P4

I’ve worked with Github my entire career and view it as an essential part. As a Product manager it allows me to keep track of my features, epics, issues and QA. It is easy to set up and integrate with tools such as intercom or notion.

Incentivized

For large-scale codebases with fixed and regular releases that do not follow a continuous delivery paradigm, Perforce is certainly well suited. In projects that are small and distinctly separated from other discrete (though potentially dependent) units, the benefits of the Perforce tool may not be as clear of a victor over other systems.

Incentivized

• Version control: GitHub provides a powerful and flexible Git-based version control system that allows teams to track changes to their code over time, collaborate on code with others, and maintain a history of their work.
• Code review: GitHub's pull request system enables teams to review code changes, discuss suggestions and merge changes in a central location. This makes it easier to catch bugs and ensure that code quality remains high.
• Collaboration: GitHub provides a variety of collaboration tools to help teams work together effectively, including issue tracking, project management, and wikis.

• Merge algorithm is smart and utilizing the visual interface to do merges makes them easier to digest.
• Easy to set up on multiple platforms and architectures and is well supported on all of them.
• Visual interface has many tools and customization options that help to optimize and personalize workflow.

Incentivized

• Not an easy tool for beginners. Prior command-line experience is expected to get started with GitHub efficiently.
• Unlike other source control platforms GitHub is a little confusing. With no proper GUI tool its hard to understand the source code version/history.
• Working with larger files can be tricky. For file sizes above 100MB, GitHub expects the developer to use different commands (lfs).
• While using the web version of GitHub, it has some restrictions on the number of files that can be uploaded at once. Recommended action is to use the command-line utility to add and push files into the repository.

• I was having a hard time learning it. Even if you are an experienced developer, there is some learning curve.
• Can be slow when working with large data sets at once.
• When working on multiple workspaces on the same machine, Perforce can make it difficult not to mess up the code.

GitHub's ease of use and continued investment into the Developer Experience have made it the de facto tool for our engineers to manage software changes. With new features that continue to come out, we have been able to consolidate several other SaaS solutions and reduce the number of tools required for each engineer to perform their job responsibilities.

We have a need to consolidate into a single package, and have such a large variety of technical proficiency among our users that Perforce seems less suitable. Many would like to remain using it, however, even those who use Perforce are the minority, and are often limited to our development teams.

Incentivized

GitHub is a clean and modern interface. The underlying integrations make it smooth to couple tasks, projects, pull requests and other business functions together. The insights and reporting is really strong and is getting better with every release. GitHub's PR tooling is strong for being web based, i do believe a better code editor would rival having to pull merge conflicts into local IDE.

Incentivized

With Perforce Helix, you can use it via the command line, via P4V, or any of the other APIs included with the product. It is extremely easy for new users to get up and running. Users of Perforce Helix only have to pull in the files of interest to them. Also, Perforce is very easy to script and integrate into your CI/CD pipeline. Streams allows you to have pinpoint control of your workflow, and P4Search is the absolute best--I wish Perforce (the company) would talk more about this. It is absolutely fabulous!

Incentivized

In our large environment, Perforce is rarely "down". We have regular maintenance windows and from time to time Perforce can feel a little slow, but its always available. Tech support has always worked with our engineers and IT department to make sure that any real performance or stability issues are addressed quickly.

Incentivized

It's a testament to how easy it is to use GitHub and how many others use it that you can pretty much find the answer to any problem you have by searching online. Consequently, I've never needed to use their support. It's an incredibly easy tool to set up initially, so it won't require much onboarding expertise to get started.

Incentivized

I had two representatives from Perforce contact me after downloading it but never responded when I had questions. I also had a difficult time finding good training material for getting started. There is a lot of available support material when running into issues, though, because of how many large companies use it.

Incentivized

This rating is related to setting up an environment from an existing Perforce repository. Initial setup of Perforce as the repository for the company was done by a separate team long prior to my inception.

Incentivized

GitHub comes handy in terms of usage and capabilities, it is easy to use and quite a user friendly tools when it comes to user experience, with limited UI/UX and it has vast exposure when it comes to third party integration and being quite mature and yet evolving and popular tool many other platform provide easy integration with the platform and make first choice for many tools architects.

Incentivized

New users of Perforce Helix can be up and running in less than thirty minutes. It is easy to use, but also very powerful. Bitbucket is slow, prone to outages, and (for large teams) requires a team of dedicated administrators. I've had request for information from Bitbucket that requires hours to pull together that would take me less than 30 seconds in Perforce Helix. Large file storage in Bitbucket is clunky and requires you to jump through too many hoops. It's not even something you have to think about with Perforce Helix, as you are only limited by your OS. Perforce Helix is very easy to use even for non-developers. I wouldn't dare ask a non-developer to store their documentation in Bitbucket.

Incentivized

• GitHub has made branching much easier for our dev team. Easy branching makes it easier for us to gain all the benefits of source control while giving us the flexibility to decide what features/branches we want to go in any particular release.
• Integration with third-party tools like Azure DevOps has allowed us to streamline workflows and gain the benefits of automated testing whenever a commit is made.
• GitHub has also raised visibility with its integration with our Sprint boards. We can easily jump to a commit from a work item.

Incentivized

• Locking assets make us have no merge problems which are harder to manage on other versions control without locking
• Almost no need to give support to artists or non-tech folks because the operations are very straightforward
• There's no way to do interim checkins without going to the process of creating a stream

Incentivized