GitHub is now offering Unlimited private repos for free. From a recent update on January 7th, 2019, Github announced a big change in their main offerings for developer and enterprise accounts.
GitHub’s new offers
- GitHub Free now allows unlimited private repositories with up to three collaborators per repository for free. Unlimited public repositories with unlimited collaborators are free as well .
- GitHub Developer – now called GitHub Pro – Includes all GitHub Free features, unlimited collaborators for private repositories, and advanced code review tools for private and public repositories.
- GitHub Enterprise – now a unified product for Enterprise Cloud and Enterprise Server– is intended for organizations using GitHub in a cloud/self-hosted configuration.
Until the last year, GitHub was offering only public repositories for free. Now the main page of GitHub pricing highlights this new options:
A Strategic move
As announced in the latest post about this good news, GitHub – now acquired by Microsoft- is planning to put GitHub as “the best place for you to code, collaborate, and connect with the global community of developers“.
Some time ago many developers were worried about the GitHub acquisition and future plans from Microsoft for a big amount of developers using this platform for free. Apparently, Microsoft is focusing its revenue in large enterprises, where the main competitors have a good part of the market share.
GitLab response
In response to this move, Sid Sijbrandij – CEO at GitLab –shared some thoughts about this strategic step from GitHub. Also, he compared some of the features in GitHub and GitLab free accounts, highlighting some additional features in GitLab:
| Free functionality | GitLab | GitHub |
|---|---|---|
| Private repositories | Yes | Yes |
| Number of collaborators | Unlimited | 3 |
| Wiki | Yes | No (public or paid only) |
| Pages | Yes | No (public or paid only) |
| Capacity | 10GB | 1GB |
| Indicates who is paying | No | Yes |
| Free CI | 2,000 min. | Maybe a free tier for Actions on Azure |
| Entire DevOps lifecycle | Yes | No |
| Location of the repo | Anywhere | Not in groups/orgs |
| API concurrent rate limit | 36000 | 5000 |
Also, Sid thought the “increased competition from us (GitLab) contributed to this change“. We expect many developers be benefited by this change.