When we talk about modern software development companies, collaborating with different members of a team is a day-to-day job, they currently have at their disposal a wide selection of tools that help developers store and manage their code efficiently and sure, if GitHub and Azure DevOps are excellent development platforms that cover most of the process, from planning to release.

Both GitHub and Azure DevOps share many of their features, with the big difference that GitHub takes the concept of Open Source and manages to expand to develop new modules, interactions and plugins, on the other hand, Azure DevOps uses a native integration with several Microsoft systems and the powerful Azure infrastructure to push its capabilities to the limit.

We will make a comparison to help decide which project management tool may be the right one to implement and which best suits the needs of a project or company.

What is GitHub?

GitHub is one of the most well-known project management and storage platforms that uses Git as a base, it is a distributed version control system for managing and tracking code, this platform is designed so that developers have the possibility to create repositories of code and save them in the cloud in a secure way, always using the Git version control system.

Its objective facilitates the organization of projects and allows the collaboration of several developers in real time.

GitHub advantages:

  • Allows developers to host projects in repositories for free.
  • Code management in public and private repositories.
  • Security and compliance, such as security alerts, automated code scanning, LDAP, audit log.
  • Facilitates sharing projects easily and quickly.
  • Offers practical cooperation tools and good integration with Git.
  • Facilitates integration with other third-party services.

What is Azure DevOps?

Azure DevOps is a set of tools and services that help manage development projects in all their phases, it is the evolution of Visual Studio Team services.

This platform supports a collaborative culture and a set of processes that bring together developers, collaborators and project managers to develop software, it also allows organizations to create and improve their products at a faster pace than they can with traditional development approaches of software.

Advantages of Azure DevOps:

  • Simple collaboration between domains.
  • Solid security
  • CI/CD (Continuous Integration, Implementation)
  • It is compatible with various programming languages, platforms and cloud providers.
  • Quick resolution of errors.
  • More stable development/production environments.
  • Allows you to manage the code through Git repositories.
  • Consistent and reliable execution environments.
  • It is compatible with other Microsoft tools.

Differences between GitHub and Azure DevOps

CI/CD continuous integration

Continuous integration or CI, is a fundamental practice of Azure DevOps to commit the code in a shared repository like Git based on many corrections and the finalization of the features. You can use the Azure Pipelines service to implement software CDs from any cloud, such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, etc. On the other hand, GitHub has a new feature called “Actions” which is an interesting way to make CI/CD pipelines from GitHub.

Project management

Azure DevOps has a set of related tools that allow you to work collaboratively in the development of the code, it has at its disposal Azure Boards which is a board that allows you to manage projects and helps to monitor them in real time of all activities, such as the construction of applications, the deployment, in addition this board has multiple extensions so that it can be perfectly integrated with other systems, instead GitHub has a project board that helps to prioritize and organize the work, so that each member of the team can manage the work through the repositories.

Platform

While Azure DevOps is open source friendly, it takes a more corporate approach to hosting projects. GitHub, on the other hand, is the platform for open code projects and communities that helps developers solve their problems by building software collaboratively.

Artifacts

Both platforms have artifact storage, which allows you to publish your packages, NuGet and NPM, but Azure DevOps also has upstream storage, which means it can also subscribe to external sources.

Code repository

Azure DevOps has a tool called Azure Repos that offers the best experience of its class to host its repositories, Git is a set of version control tools that is used to manage the code, Both Azure Repos and GitHub support an excellent experience of code review, webhooks, pull requests, etc. Azure DevOps provides free private repositories, while GitHub’s extensive feature set for team-based software development makes it the prominent platform of choice for hosting Git repositories.

Prices

Azure DevOps is free for a maximum of 5 users for open source projects, as well as for small projects. The paid service starts at 6 dollars per month per user or 30 dollars per month for 10 users. GitHub, on the other hand, is free for all public open source projects and also for teams. The payment price starts at 4 dollars per user per month with public/private repositories with the Enterprise plan.

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Comparative table

Comparative GitHub Azure Devops
Boards Backlog and Kanban boards with GitHub Issues and GitHub Project More intuitive board for Scrum development with Azure Boards.
Repository management GitHub Repositories Azure Repos
Integrated development Codespaces Visual Stidio Code / Visual Studio
Implementation model Cloud u OnPremise Cloud u OnPremise
Active Directory integration Enterprise model only Native integration
Testing N/A Azure Test Plans
CI/CD GitHub Actions Azure Pipelines
Documentation GitHub Wiki Azure Wiki
Permission management High level for collaborators (reading/writing) Granular management of permissions to collaborators of various levels
Reports GitHub Insights Azure reporting / Dashboards

Which platform is better?

It is difficult to reach a conclusion and ensure that the platform is the best, there are several influencing factors, such as the scope, type of project, number of collaborators, compatibility with other systems, reports, previous infrastructure, and the budget available for the implementation, are key points to define and choose one option over another.

Azure DevOps offers a large scale, better control, integration and professionalism in how to manage projects, but this entails a considerable additional cost, GitHub has the flexibility and scaling that the support of the Open Source community that supports it, without leaving aside the characteristics of project administration; without leaving aside, as the projects grow, the characteristics resemble more and more Azure DevOps.