A comparison of Github and Visual Studio Online

Github Pricing (click to enlarge image)

* GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service, which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features.

* The site was launched in April 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett.

* As of 2014, GitHub reports having over 3.4 million users and with 16.7 million repositories making it the largest code host in the world. It is written in Ruby.

* Peter Levine, general partner at GitHub's investor Andreessen Horowitz, stated that GitHub had been growing revenue at 300% annually since 2008 "profitably nearly the entire way"

Visual Studio Online pricing & features (click to enlarge image)

* Microsoft announced the release Visual Studio Online, Microsoft's hosted version of Team Foundation Server in the cloud. in November 2013.

* Visual Studio Online expands over Team Foundation Server by making it available on the Internet and implementing a rolling release model

* The free plan of Visual Studio Online allows unlimited private code repos unlike Github

* You can use Visual Studio and Git to collaborate with your team using Team Foundation Server (on-premises or on Visual Studio Online), on CodePlex, or on a third-party service such as GitHub or Bitbucket. In Jan 2013, Microsoft announced that they are adding full Git support into their ALM products (Team Foundation Server And Team Foundation Service, the earlier avatar of Visual Studio Online)

* Visual Studio Tools for Git by Microsoft is an extension supported by VS2012 (Update 2). Visual Studio 2013 natively supports Git.

Related: Notes from the MVA course "Fundamentals of Visual Studio Online"