With Microsoft now owning GitHub, the technical teams have been integrated, resulting in Azure DevOps and GitHub having the same leadership and personnel. The long-term strategic direction will be GitHub, but there is no plan for Azure DevOps to go into maintenance/sunset; therefore, choosing Azure DevOps is entirely OK in short to (undefined) medium term. Azure DevOps is currently in the early stages of development. When migration tools are needed, Microsoft will give them.
Some holes in GitHub have now been remedied, most notably in native CI/CD support (Actions, forked from Azure DevOps pipelines). As a result, I’d say they’re roughly equal currently. Because GitHub is the strategic approach, I’d recommend looking at GitHub and leveraging capabilities like Advanced Security that Azure DevOps lacks. Instead, I would choose Azure DevOps for the following reasons:
- Cloud Service with Data Sovereignty in the UK
GitHub Enterprise Cloud is currently only available in the United States, whereas Azure DevOps Services can be hosted in the Azure UK South zone. This isn’t an issue if you’re utilising the self-hosted versions (GitHub Enterprise Server and Azure DevOps Server), as you may put them wherever you like (on-prem or cloud).
- Work tracking
GitHub Issues does not have the same task tracking and planning capabilities as Azure Boards. This is changing, and GitHub’s new Projects boards go a long way toward filling the void, but it’s still not up to par.
Customers are increasingly opting for Azure DevOps (for Boards) and GitHub in this area (for everything else). This is reflected in licensing, which effectively combines the two.
- TFVC
Because GitHub only supports git (and SVN clients), Azure DevOps is the best solution for long-time TFS customers who use TFVS for version management.
The choice is yours to which pipeline you go down