Don’t flock to GitHub just yet!
With the recent announcement, GitHub is now free for teams. Well, it has always been free but only for public repositories. Now GitHub allows unlimited private repositories as well.
This is certainly good news for a lot of startups and developers who would want to keep their repositories private. But we need to look at the pricing page of GitHub to know the pitfalls as well.
Before I get started, let me be very clear. I like GitHub and what it represents to the Open Source community. I am not a supporter of GitHub or Gitlab. I am just representing facts to the best of my knowledge.
GitHub is only making the private repositories unlimited. All the features a team would expect like Required reviewers, Code owners are in the paid plan. GitHub has reduced its Team plan (ironic as they market GitHub is free for teams :D) to $4 per user/month. This is still good news but again it comes with limited Actions and GitHub Packages storage. 2GB for GitHub Packages storage is outrageous as it’s too low. So you would eventually have to get their Enterprise plan to get all your needs which is about $21 per user/month.
If you take to look at one of the alternatives Gitlab, there have been unlimited private repos from the beginning with the free plan along with unlimited Docker, Maven, Nuget and NPM registries. You also get to use Gitlab CI but it’s only 2000 minutes but it’s the same as GitHub’s 2000 minutes of Actions.
If Mandatory reviewers & Code owners are required, you can go to their paid plan which is priced the same as GitHub’s team price of $4 per user/month. You get better task management and push rules. However, on GitHub, you get 3000 Action minutes. It’s not like Gitlab is staying silent with this stunt pulled by GitHub, they also started putting up the free month for trying out their Gold plan.
So the decision of the developers boils down to whether you need a service that is providing unlimited packages registries or 1000 more Action minutes.
I am supporting neither GitHub nor Gitlab. Both are amazing platforms. It’s just when it comes to teams and private repositories, I prefer Gitlab but my open source projects will forever continue to stay on GitHub.
