What Is GitHub Used For? Explained

Over 180 million developers use GitHub. But if you’re new to software development, the platform can feel like a black box.

So what is GitHub used for, exactly? At its core, it is a cloud-based platform built on Git for hosting code, tracking changes, and collaborating on projects. But it does a lot more than store files.

Teams run CI/CD pipelines through it. Open source communities coordinate thousands of contributors on it. Developers build portfolios, host websites, and write code with AI assistance, all inside the same platform.

This guide breaks down how GitHub works, what developers and companies actually use it for, and how its tools fit into the broader development process from version control to deployment.

What Is GitHub

GitHub is a cloud-based platform for hosting, tracking, and collaborating on code. It runs on top of Git, the distributed version control system that Linus Torvalds created in 2005 to manage Linux kernel development.

Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion. That price tag made sense. According to GitHub’s own data, the platform now hosts over 180 million developers and more than 630 million repositories.

The distinction between Git and GitHub trips up a lot of people. Git is the tool. It tracks every change you make to files, lets you create branches, and handles merging. GitHub is the platform built around that tool. It adds pull requests, issue tracking, project boards, access controls, and a social layer where developers follow each other’s work.

More than 90% of Fortune 100 companies use GitHub in their development workflows, according to GitHub’s About page. That tells you something about how deeply it sits in the software development process across industries.

In 2024 alone, developers made over 5 billion contributions across public and private projects (ElectroIQ). And the growth keeps accelerating. The Octoverse 2025 report showed more than 36 million new developers joined the platform in a single year, roughly one new developer every second.

How GitHub Works

GitHub organizes everything around repositories, branches, commits, and pull requests. If you understand those four things, you understand the mechanics of the platform.

A repository holds all files for a project plus the complete revision history of each file. Think of it as the project folder, but with every change ever made still accessible.

Repositories and Branches

Repositories are the basic unit. Every project on GitHub lives in one. They contain source code, documentation, configuration files, and a README that explains what the project does.

Branches let developers work on features or fixes without touching the main code. You create a branch, make changes there, and only merge it back when the work is ready.

GitHub reported that developers created approximately 230 new repositories every minute in 2025, according to the Octoverse report. Public repositories make up 63% of all projects, though 81.5% of actual contributions happen in private repos.

Pull Requests and Code Review

Pull requests are where collaboration actually happens on GitHub. A developer finishes work on a branch, opens a pull request, and teammates review the changes before they get merged.

The code review process built into pull requests catches bugs early, keeps code quality consistent, and spreads knowledge across the team. Monthly pull request merges averaged 43.2 million in 2025, a 23% increase from the prior year (Octoverse 2025).

Most teams set up branch protection rules that require at least one approval before merging. Some add automated checks too, like running tests or linting the code.

Version Control and Code Tracking

This is the thing GitHub was built for. Tracking every change to a codebase with a complete, searchable history.

Developers pushed nearly 1 billion commits in 2025 alone, a 25% increase year-over-year according to the Octoverse report. Each commit is a recorded snapshot. Who changed what, when, and why.

How Commit History Works

Every commit gets a unique hash. You can jump back to any point in a project’s history, compare two versions side by side using git diff, or figure out exactly who introduced a bug with git blame.

Took me a while to appreciate how much this matters. When something breaks in production on a Friday evening (and it always does), being able to revert a commit in seconds instead of manually hunting for the problem is a lifesaver.

Branching Strategies Teams Actually Use

Git Flow: Separate branches for development, staging, and production. Heavier process, works well for scheduled releases.

Trunk-based development: Everyone commits to the main branch frequently. Smaller changes, faster integration. This is what most teams doing continuous integration prefer.

GitHub Flow: A simpler model. Branch off main, do your work, open a pull request, merge after review. Good for teams that deploy often.

The Linux kernel project is probably the best real-world example. Thousands of contributors worldwide use Git and GitHub to manage one of the largest and most active open source codebases ever built. The source control management capabilities that handle that kind of scale are the same ones available to a solo developer building a side project.

Team Collaboration on Software Projects

GitHub is not just a place to store code. For a lot of teams, it is the workspace where software development actually gets coordinated.

According to Kinsta, over 90% of Fortune 100 companies use GitHub. At that scale, you need more than file hosting. You need issue tracking, project planning, access controls, and integrations with the rest of your stack.

GitHub Issues and Project Boards

Issues are GitHub’s built-in defect tracking and task management system. You can file bugs, request features, assign work to specific people, and label everything for filtering later.

Project boards work like a Kanban board. Cards move between columns (To Do, In Progress, Done), giving the whole team visibility into what’s happening.

Teams using these tools alongside a solid project management framework can run entire sprints without leaving GitHub. It connects with Slack, Jira, and other tools through API integrations and webhooks too.

GitHub Organizations and Access Control

Organizations let companies group repositories and manage who has access to what. You set up teams, assign permission levels, and control visibility across the entire company’s code.

GitHub Enterprise is adopted by 92% of Fortune 100 companies according to CoinLaw’s 2026 data. Enterprise adds single sign-on, audit logs, and advanced security features on top of the standard collaboration tools.

The different software development roles within a company typically get different access levels. A QA engineer might only need read access to certain repos, while a software architect needs write access across multiple projects.

Open Source Development and Community Contribution

GitHub hit 1 billion contributions to public and open source projects in 2024. That is not a typo. One billion, in a single year.

The New Stack reported that 1.4 million developers contributed to open source for the first time in 2024. This was not just existing contributors doing more work. It was a wave of new people entering the ecosystem.

How Open Source Contribution Works on GitHub

The process follows a consistent pattern across almost every project:

• Fork the repository to create your own copy
• Make changes in a branch on your fork
• Open a pull request back to the original project
• The maintainers review, discuss, and decide whether to merge

Microsoft’s VS Code repository leads the pack with 19,800 contributors, followed by Home Assistant with 13,500 and Flutter with 12,400 (ElectroIQ).

In 2024, there was a 98% increase in the total number of open source projects on GitHub (The New Stack). That growth rate is not normal. A big part of it comes from AI projects. Developers created over 70,000 new public generative AI repositories in early 2025.

GitHub Sponsors and Funding

Open source maintainers often work for free. GitHub Sponsors tries to fix that by letting companies and individuals fund the developers whose work they depend on.

The program has facilitated over $50 million in contributions across 120+ regions, with corporate sponsorships growing 80% year-over-year according to CoinLaw. But let’s be honest, most maintainers still don’t make a living from sponsorships alone. It’s a step in the right direction. Not a solution.

The 2024 Open Source Funding Survey by GitHub, the Linux Foundation, and Harvard found that 86% of contribution value still comes in the form of employee labor from companies letting their staff contribute during work hours.

CI/CD and Automation with GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions turned GitHub from a code hosting platform into a full build pipeline. You write YAML workflow files, define triggers, and GitHub runs your automation on its own servers.

GitHub Actions now runs over 5 million workflows daily, up 40% year-over-year (CoinLaw). The GitHub Marketplace lists over 22,000 actions across 32 categories, and the marketplace itself is expanding roughly 41% per year (SQ Magazine).

What Teams Automate with Actions

Testing: Run unit tests, integration tests, and regression tests automatically every time someone pushes code or opens a pull request.

Building: Compile code, create Docker images, and generate build artifacts without manual steps. Teams doing continuous deployment rely on this heavily.

Deploying: Push changes to AWS, Vercel, Netlify, or any other hosting provider. You can set up approval gates and staged deployment pipelines with environment-specific rules.

Code quality: Run linters, check code coverage, and scan for security vulnerabilities on every commit.

GitHub Actions vs Other CI/CD Tools

JetBrains’ State of Developer Ecosystem 2025 report shows 55% of developers regularly use CI/CD tools. Organizationally, GitHub Actions leads with 33% adoption, followed by Jenkins at 28% and GitLab CI at 19%.

The biggest advantage of Actions is proximity. Your CI/CD lives right next to your code, your pull requests, and your issues. No separate authentication, no extra service to manage. JetBrains’ survey found that the top reason teams pick a CI/CD tool is “it lives where our code lives.”

A build engineer I worked with once described the shift to Actions as “deleting infrastructure.” That tracks. For teams running DevOps workflows on GitHub, adding Actions removes an entire category of setup and maintenance work that used to require a dedicated build server.

Hosting and Deploying Websites with GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages is a free static site hosting service baked directly into the platform. You push HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to a repository, and GitHub publishes them as a live website.

No server configuration. No hosting bills. That is the whole pitch.

What GitHub Pages Supports

Pages works with static site generators like Jekyll (built in by default), Hugo, and Astro. You can also use it for plain HTML if you want to keep things simple.

Limits to know about:

• Published sites capped at 1 GB in size
• Soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB per month
• Maximum 10 builds per hour

Custom domains are supported with HTTPS included. Most developers use Pages for project documentation, personal portfolios, and landing pages for open source tools.

Where GitHub Pages Falls Short

No server-side processing. No databases. No backend logic.

If you need dynamic functionality, you are looking at progressive web apps with client-side logic, or you move to something like Vercel or Netlify. For teams building full web apps with back-end development needs, Pages just is not the right tool.

Still, for what it does, it is hard to beat free. The freeCodeCamp documentation site runs on GitHub Pages. So do thousands of developer blogs and project sites.

GitHub as a Developer Portfolio

A CodePath survey shared with Fortune in 2025 found that 38% of engineering leaders ranked side projects and portfolios as the top signal when evaluating candidates outside of interviews. Public code portfolios like GitHub came in at 34%.

Your GitHub profile is proof of work. Not a list of claims on a resume, but actual code people can read, run, and evaluate.

What Hiring Managers Look For

Contribution graphs show activity patterns, but quality matters more than volume. A green wall of commits means nothing if the code behind it is sloppy.

According to Recruiter Daily Dev, 83% of technical hiring managers view GitHub profiles as more reliable than traditional resumes. The same source found that 68% of top engineers are discovered through the platform.

Netflix reportedly used targeted GitHub search queries to find Go developers, cutting their time-to-hire by 33%.

Building a Profile That Works

Pinned repositories: Showcase your 4-6 best projects. Clean code, clear README files, and working demos.

Profile README: GitHub lets you create a special repository matching your username that displays on your profile page. Use it to explain who you are and what you focus on.

Real contributions over activity theater: A few thoughtful pull requests to well-known projects say more than hundreds of trivial commits. Hiring managers spend limited time reviewing profiles. Flatiron School notes recruiters typically scan a GitHub profile in seconds, so clean documentation makes or breaks the impression.

GitHub for Non-Code Projects

GitHub’s version control works on any text-based file, not just source code. And people have been creative with that.

Writing, Legal, and Design Use Cases

Authors track book manuscripts in Markdown with full revision history. Legal teams version policy documents and contracts so every edit is traceable. Designers store assets alongside design documents and use pull requests for review cycles.

Data scientists share Jupyter notebooks and datasets on GitHub regularly. The platform supports rendering .ipynb files directly in the browser, making it a decent option for publishing research alongside the data that backs it up.

GitHub Classroom for Education

GitHub Classroom lets teachers create virtual classrooms, distribute starter code, and automatically collect and grade assignments. Nearly 2 million students currently use GitHub Copilot through the Student Developer Pack, according to GitHub Education.

India ranked second globally for GitHub Education users in 2024, showing how broadly the platform has spread beyond professional development teams into academic settings.

GitHub Copilot and AI-Assisted Development

GitHub Copilot generates 46% of code written by its users on average, according to Quantumrun. For Java developers, that number climbs to 61%.

Copilot is an AI pair programmer powered by large language models from OpenAI and other providers. It runs inside your editor, suggests code as you type, and can explain, refactor, or generate entire functions from natural language prompts.

What Copilot Actually Does

Inline completions: Predicts what you are about to write and offers whole-line or multi-line suggestions in real time.

Copilot Chat: Ask questions about your code directly in VS Code, JetBrains, or on GitHub.com. By April 2025, Copilot Chat had auto-reviewed over 8 million pull requests (Tenet).

Coding agent: Launched at Microsoft Build 2025, this agent can autonomously fix bugs and add features by cloning repos, analyzing code, and opening draft pull requests for human review.

Productivity Impact

GitHub’s own research, conducted with Accenture across 4,800 developers, found specific gains:

• Developers completed tasks 55% faster with Copilot
• Pull request time dropped from 9.6 days to 2.4 days
• 87% reported less mental effort on repetitive tasks

Duolingo reported a 10% speed boost for experienced developers and a 67% drop in median code review turnaround time after adopting Copilot (Tenet).

But it is not all upside. A 2024 GitClear analysis found that AI-generated code has a 41% higher churn rate compared to human-written code, meaning more frequent revisions (LinearB). Teams using AI code generation tools still need solid testing practices and human review.

Copilot Pricing Tiers

Gartner forecasts that 90% of enterprise software engineers will use AI coding assistants by 2028, up from less than 14% in early 2024. GitHub Copilot currently holds roughly 42% of the AI coding assistant market (Quantumrun).

GitHub Pricing and Plan Differences

GitHub itself (separate from Copilot) runs on a freemium model. You can do a lot without paying anything.

What You Get for Free

Unlimited public and private repositories. 2,000 GitHub Actions minutes per month. Community support. GitHub Pages for public repos.

For solo developers, freelancers, and small open source projects, the free tier covers most needs. You can host code, run basic CI/CD workflows, and collaborate on pull requests without spending a dollar.

Paid Tiers Compared

The real jump is from Team to Enterprise. That is where you get SAML single sign-on, audit capabilities, and advanced security scanning. GitHub Advanced Security recently unbundled into separate products: Secret Protection at $21/month per committer and Code Security at $32/month per committer (CoinLaw).

How GitHub Compares to Alternatives

GitLab has about 30 million users, Bitbucket around 15 million, according to Kinsta. GitHub’s 180+ million developers make it roughly 6x larger than its nearest competitor.

GitLab bundles more features into its free tier (built-in CI/CD was there before GitHub Actions existed). Bitbucket integrates tightly with the Atlassian stack (Jira, Confluence). But GitHub’s ecosystem size, marketplace, and Copilot integration give it a significant edge for most teams.

The GitHub Education pack gives students free access to GitHub Pro, Copilot, and a bundle of partner tools. With nearly 2 million students already on Copilot, the platform is locking in the next generation of developers early.

FAQ on What Is Github Used For

Is GitHub only for programmers?

No. Writers, lawyers, data scientists, and teachers use GitHub too. Any text-based project benefits from version control. GitHub Classroom alone serves nearly 2 million students for assignments and grading.

What is the difference between Git and GitHub?

Git is a distributed version control system that runs locally on your machine. GitHub is the cloud-based platform built around Git that adds collaboration features like pull requests, issue tracking, and project boards.

Is GitHub free to use?

Yes. The free tier includes unlimited public and private repositories, 2,000 GitHub Actions minutes per month, and GitHub Pages hosting. Most solo developers and small teams never need a paid plan.

Can I host a website on GitHub?

GitHub Pages lets you host static websites directly from a repository. It supports custom domains and HTTPS. You cannot run server-side code or databases, but it works well for portfolios, blogs, and project documentation sites.

What programming languages does GitHub support?

GitHub supports every programming language. Developers used nearly 500 languages on the platform in 2024. Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, and C++ are the most popular based on the Octoverse 2025 report.

How does GitHub help with team collaboration?

Teams use pull requests for code review, issues for task tracking, and project boards for planning. Organizations set permission levels per team. It integrates with Slack, Jira, and other tools through its API.

What is GitHub Copilot?

Copilot is an AI coding assistant that suggests code in real time inside your editor. It generates roughly 46% of code for its users on average and supports multiple AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Is GitHub safe for private projects?

Private repositories restrict access to people you explicitly invite. GitHub Enterprise adds SAML SSO, audit logs, and advanced security scanning. Over 92% of Fortune 100 companies trust the platform for their proprietary codebases.

What are GitHub Actions used for?

GitHub Actions automate workflows like running tests, building code, and deploying applications. They trigger on events such as pushes or pull requests. Over 5 million workflows run daily on the platform.

How do open source contributions work on GitHub?

You fork a repository, make changes in a branch, and submit a pull request to the original project. Maintainers review and decide whether to merge your work. In 2024, 1.4 million developers contributed to open source for the first time.

Conclusion

Understanding what is GitHub used for comes down to one thing: it is where modern source control meets real collaboration. From managing repositories and running automated workflows to hosting open source projects with thousands of contributors, the platform covers the full app lifecycle.

GitHub Copilot is changing how code gets written. GitHub Actions handles deployment without a separate CI/CD service. GitHub Pages gives you free hosting in seconds.

With over 180 million developers on the platform and 92% of Fortune 100 companies relying on it, GitHub is not just a tool. It is the standard infrastructure for building software in 2025 and beyond.

Whether you are tracking commits on a solo side project or coordinating pull requests across a distributed engineering team, the platform scales to fit. Pick a repository, push some code, and start building.

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Bogdan Sandu

Bogdan Sandu specializes in web design, focusing on creating user-friendly websites, and innovative UI kits.

Many of his resources are available on various design marketplaces and for free on Codepen.

Over the years, he's worked with a range of clients and contributed to design publications like Design Your Way, Designmodo, WebDesignerDepot, WPDean, and Speckyboy, and Slider Revolution among others.

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