GitHub vs. Sourcetree

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
GitHub
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
GitHub is a platform that hosts public and private code and provides software development and collaboration tools. Features include version control, issue tracking, code review, team management, syntax highlighting, etc. Personal plans ($0-50), Organizational plans ($0-200), and Enterprise plans are available.
$40
per year per user
Sourcetree
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
Sourcetree, by Atlassian, is a free version control client for Mac and Windows that works with Git and Mercurial repositories. It's distributed version control allows developers to visualize code, review changesets, stash, cherry-pick between branches or commit with a single click.N/A
Pricing
GitHubSourcetree
Editions & Modules
Team
$40
per year per user
Enterprise
$210
per year per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitHubSourcetree
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GitHubSourcetree
Features
GitHubSourcetree
Version Control Software Features
Comparison of Version Control Software Features features of Product A and Product B
GitHub
7.9
Ratings
4% below category average
Sourcetree
6.3
Ratings
26% below category average
Branching and Merging9.70 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Version History8.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Version Control Collaboration Tools7.10 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Pull Requests9.60 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Code Review Tools7.70 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Project Access Control8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated Testing Integration7.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue Tracking Integration4.10 Ratings3.00 Ratings
Branch Protection9.30 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GitHubSourcetree
Small Businesses
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Perforce P4
Perforce P4
Score 7.6 out of 10
Perforce P4
Perforce P4
Score 7.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GitHubSourcetree
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(0 ratings)
6.1
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
3.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GitHubSourcetree
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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I prefer to work visually and use the tool for merge and rebase operations. It helps when managing a large number of repos.
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Pros
  • 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.
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  • Allows to manage GIT repositories in an intuitive and simple user interface
  • Visually represents complicated workflows and branching
  • Integrates with most well known GIT repository managing services
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Cons
  • 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.
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  • Refreshing of the interface after a commit or merge
  • All elements being consistent with the repo status
  • Select all button on Trach status on different branches
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Likelihood to Renew
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.
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No answers on this topic
Usability
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.
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We help new users onboard quickly and then use Sourcetree to handle their day-to-day SCM needs for managing CIs (Configuration Items). We can visually show management the branching and commit history to show the flow and pace of development.
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Support Rating
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.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
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I tried GitHub Desktop for a couple of days, but it is just not visual enough for me. It has no graph display for branches. Too much clicking is required to get info that the Sourcetree UI shows by default. Sourcetree gives you that "Big Picture" dashboard. GitHub Desktop seems unfinished to me due to its lack of this overview screen.
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Return on Investment
  • 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.
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  • In my experience, using Sourcetree actually slows down development if you're the average developer needing to do simple git actions. Getting set up is fast, but the learning curve to use the tool is just too steep if you're just looking to push, pull, commit, branch etc.
  • Sourcetree is not implemented by default at our company, but is recommended as we primarily use Atlassian products. However the lack of integration with other Atlassian products means that this git GUI doesn't give any more or less ROI for your Atlassian ecosystem compared to another git GUI tool.
  • For auditing and exploring history Sourcetree can be very helpful. Having all of this information in one place with a plethora of actions and tools at your disposal means you can audit repos much quicker than any other git GUI or online repo explorer.
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ScreenShots