About GitHub

GitHub, Inc. is an American multinational organisation that uses Git to offer software creation and version control hosting. It provides Git's distributed version control and source code management (SCM) capabilities, plus its own features.

It offers access control and multiple shared features for each project, such as bug monitoring, role requests, task management, continuous integration and wikis. It is based in California and has been a Microsoft affiliate since 2018.

Its core services are provided free of charge through GitHub. The more specialised technology and business facilities are commercial. To host open-source projects, Free GitHub accounts are widely used.

As of January 2019, GitHub provides all plans, including free accounts, with unrestricted private repositories, but only allows up to three collaborators per repository for free. The free plan requires unrestricted collaborators beginning on April 15, 2020, but limits private repositories to 2,000 minutes of GitHub actions each month.

GitHub has more than 40 million users and more than 190 million repositories (including at least 28 million public repositories) as of January 2020, making it the world's largest source code host.