GitHub

Overview

GitHub is the world's leading software development platform, founded in 2008 by Tom Preston Werner, Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Scott Chacon. Acquired by Microsoft in 2018 for $7.5 billion, GitHub hosts over 420 million repositories and serves more than 100 million developers worldwide. GitHub has become one of the most important companies in the AI coding space through GitHub Copilot, launched in 2021 as the first mainstream AI pair programmer. Copilot is now used by millions of developers and has expanded from simple code completions into a full AI coding platform with chat, code review, autonomous coding agents, and multi model support (GPT, Claude, Gemini). In 2025, GitHub launched the official GitHub MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, making the entire GitHub platform accessible to AI agents. The MCP server provides 90+ tools across repositories, issues, pull requests, actions, security, and more, allowing any MCP compatible AI tool to interact with GitHub programmatically through natural language.

What makes them different

GitHub's unique advantage is the combination of being the default platform where most of the world's code already lives AND having a deeply integrated AI layer on top. No other company has this combination. Compared to GitLab or Bitbucket, GitHub has an order of magnitude more developers, more open source projects, and a far more advanced AI integration through Copilot. GitLab offers stronger built in CI/CD and DevSecOps, but GitHub Actions has closed the gap and GitHub's AI capabilities are years ahead. The GitHub MCP server is particularly significant because it gives any AI agent (Claude Code, Cursor, custom agents) the ability to manage repositories, issues, pull requests, CI/CD workflows, and security scanning through natural language. This makes GitHub not just a code host but an AI accessible development infrastructure layer. GitHub Copilot's multi model approach (supporting Claude, GPT, Gemini, and others) is also unique among AI coding tools. Most competitors are locked to a single model provider, while Copilot lets developers choose the best model for each task.

Their tools

GitHub

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github

The world's largest code hosting platform with 100M+ developers. Repositories, Actions CI/CD, Pages, Packages, and an official MCP server that gives AI agents full access to the GitHub ecosystem.

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