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GitHub vs Gitter: What are the differences?

Key Differences between GitHub and Gitter

  1. Functionality: GitHub is primarily a code hosting platform that offers version control, collaboration tools, and project management features. It allows users to track changes, manage code repositories, and collaborate with team members. On the other hand, Gitter is a communication platform designed specifically for developers. It provides real-time chat rooms, allowing developers to have discussions, share code snippets, and engage in conversations related to programming.

  2. Focus: GitHub focuses on providing a platform for hosting and managing code repositories. It offers version control features, issue tracking, code review tools, and project management capabilities. Additionally, it allows developers to collaborate on projects using features like pull requests and code reviews. Gitter, on the other hand, places its main emphasis on facilitating real-time conversations and discussions among developers. It aims to provide a platform for developers to connect with each other, ask questions, and engage in community-driven discussions.

  3. Community: GitHub has a large and active community of developers, with millions of users and numerous open-source projects hosted on the platform. It serves as a hub for developers to contribute to projects, discover new repositories, and showcase their work. Gitter, while also having a developer-focused community, is more centered around real-time interactions. It provides a platform for developers to join specific chat rooms based on their interests or projects, enabling them to connect with like-minded individuals and discuss topics of mutual interest.

  4. Integration: GitHub offers extensive integration capabilities, allowing developers to connect their repositories with various tools and services. It integrates with popular development tools, such as continuous integration systems, project management platforms, and code quality analysis tools. Gitter, on the other hand, is limited in terms of integration options. While it allows users to add widgets and badges to their GitHub repositories, it primarily operates as a standalone communication platform with less emphasis on interconnecting with other tools.

  5. Interface: GitHub provides a comprehensive web interface where users can browse code, view pull requests, manage issues, and perform various other code-related activities. It offers a visually appealing and user-friendly interface with a focus on code and collaboration. Gitter, on the other hand, is primarily chat-based and offers a simple and minimalist interface. It emphasizes real-time conversations and displays messages in chronological order, making it easy for developers to engage in quick and focused discussions.

  6. Ownership: GitHub is owned by Microsoft, a technology giant with a wide range of products and services. Being a part of Microsoft, GitHub benefits from its resources, infrastructure, and support. Gitter, on the other hand, is not owned by Microsoft and operates as an independent entity. While both platforms have their own sets of features and advantages, GitHub's connection to Microsoft provides additional stability and trustworthiness.

In Summary, GitHub is primarily a code hosting and collaboration platform with a strong focus on version control and project management, while Gitter is a real-time chat platform aimed at facilitating developer discussions and interactions.

Advice on GitHub and Gitter
Needs advice
on
SlackSlackDiscordDiscord
and
GitterGitter

From a StackShare Community member: “We’re about to start a chat group for our open source project (over 5K stars on GitHub) so we can let our community collaborate more closely. The obvious choice would be Slack (k8s and a ton of major projects use it), but we’ve seen Gitter (webpack uses it) for a lot of open source projects, Discord (Vue.js moved to them), and as of late I’m seeing Spectrum more and more often. Does anyone have experience with these or other alternatives? Is it even worth assessing all these options, or should we just go with Slack? Some things that are important to us: free, all the regular integrations (GitHub, Heroku, etc), mobile & desktop apps, and open source is of course a plus."

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Replies (4)
Rebecca Driscoll
Recommends
on
SlackSlack
at

We use Slack to increase productivity by simplifying communication and putting Slack in the middle of our communication workflow #Communications #Collaboration

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Arnaud Lemercier
Expert En Dveloppement Web Et Systmes Dinformations, Designer UX, UI, Co-grant at Wixiweb · | 4 upvotes · 191.3K views
Recommends
on
DiscordDiscord
at

We use Discord to tracking some action and errors (logs / alerting / assertion). it's free and simple to use with mobile application et notifications

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Michael Ionita
Recommends
on
SlackSlack
at

We use Slack because we can let "tools talk to us" and automate processes in our dev team using bots.

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Julien Tanay
Lead DevOps. Every day product hacker. at Dior · | 2 upvotes · 186.9K views
Recommends
on
DiscordDiscord
at

Our Discord Server is our n°1 community stop; we gather feedback from our users from here, discuss about new features, announce new releases, and so on.

We even use it for internal meetings and calls !

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Decisions about GitHub and Gitter
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 · 651.9K 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 Gitter
  • 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
  • 486
    Great community
  • 482
    Remote team collaboration
  • 451
    Great way to share
  • 442
    Pull request and features planning
  • 147
    Just works
  • 132
    Integrated in many tools
  • 121
    Free Public Repos
  • 116
    Github Gists
  • 112
    Github pages
  • 83
    Easy to find repos
  • 62
    Open source
  • 60
    It's free
  • 60
    Easy to find projects
  • 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
    Newsfeed
  • 10
    Standard in Open Source collab
  • 8
    Fast
  • 8
    It integrates directly with Hipchat
  • 8
    Beautiful user experience
  • 7
    Easy to discover new code libraries
  • 6
    Smooth integration
  • 6
    Cloud SCM
  • 6
    Nice API
  • 6
    Graphs
  • 6
    Integrations
  • 6
    It's awesome
  • 5
    Quick Onboarding
  • 5
    Remarkable uptime
  • 5
    CI Integration
  • 5
    Hands down best online Git service available
  • 5
    Reliable
  • 4
    Free HTML hosting
  • 4
    Version Control
  • 4
    Simple but powerful
  • 4
    Unlimited Public Repos at no cost
  • 4
    Security options
  • 4
    Loved by developers
  • 4
    Uses GIT
  • 4
    Easy to use and collaborate with others
  • 3
    IAM
  • 3
    Nice to use
  • 3
    Ci
  • 3
    Easy deployment via SSH
  • 2
    Good tools support
  • 2
    Leads the copycats
  • 2
    Free private repos
  • 2
    Free HTML hostings
  • 2
    Easy and efficient maintainance of the projects
  • 2
    Beautiful
  • 2
    Never dethroned
  • 2
    IAM integration
  • 2
    Very Easy to Use
  • 2
    Easy to use
  • 2
    All in one development service
  • 2
    Self Hosted
  • 2
    Issues tracker
  • 2
    Easy source control and everything is backed up
  • 1
    Profound
  • 63
    Github integration
  • 55
    Free
  • 45
    Markdown support
  • 19
    Markdown
  • 17
    Graceful integration
  • 16
    Project-oriented
  • 15
    MARKDOOOOWN
  • 12
    IRC bridge
  • 9
    Integrates with everything
  • 8
    LaTeX
  • 4
    Apps available for most platforms
  • 2
    Cross-repository issue reference
  • 2
    Github login
  • 1
    IRC support
  • 1
    My new fav'rite thing is on it
  • 1
    Very fast work
  • 1
    Very open
  • 1
    Now open source
  • 1
    Open source
  • 1
    Free unlimited archives
  • 1
    Open access (no invitation needed)
  • 1
    Single account for all communities
  • 1
    Free, open & free hosting

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of GitHub
Cons of Gitter
  • 53
    Owned by micrcosoft
  • 37
    Expensive for lone developers that want private repos
  • 15
    Relatively slow product/feature release cadence
  • 10
    API scoping could be better
  • 8
    Only 3 collaborators for private repos
  • 3
    Limited featureset for issue management
  • 2
    GitHub Packages does not support SNAPSHOT versions
  • 2
    Does not have a graph for showing history like git lens
  • 1
    No multilingual interface
  • 1
    Takes a long time to commit
  • 1
    Expensive
  • 2
    Sends data to US Gov

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 Gitter?

Free chat rooms for your public repositories. A bit like IRC only smarter. Chats for private repositories as well as organisations.

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What companies use GitHub?
What companies use Gitter?
See which teams inside your own company are using GitHub or Gitter.
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Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with GitHub?
What tools integrate with Gitter?

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What are some alternatives to GitHub and Gitter?
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