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About this tool
Compare git flow, GitHub flow, trunk-based development and release branching, scored against your team size and release cadence.
This tool compares the four mainstream git branching strategies — git flow, GitHub flow, trunk-based development and release branching (GitLab flow) — by scoring each against your team size, release cadence, CI maturity, multi-version needs and compliance gates. The scoring encodes the guidance from each strategy's own documentation, including Vincent Driessen's 2020 advice that git flow is a poor fit for continuously delivered web apps. It is for tech leads choosing or revisiting a branching model.
Open Git Branching Strategy Comparison on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Paste your code or data sample into the workspace.
Pick the format, conversion, or analysis you need.
Copy the polished result straight back into your project.
Every point a strategy scores comes with the sentence explaining why, so the output survives team scrutiny.
Rules come from nvie.com, GitHub's docs, trunkbaseddevelopment.com and GitLab's docs — not folklore.
Each strategy also lists why it may fail in your situation, like trunk-based development without CI.
Git flow uses five branch types (main, develop, feature, release, hotfix) and suits scheduled, versioned releases; GitHub flow uses just main plus short-lived feature branches merged by pull request and deployed immediately. GitHub flow is dramatically simpler but assumes a single continuously deployed version of the software.
For continuously delivered web applications, its own author thinks so: Vincent Driessen added a note to the original 2010 article in March 2020 saying such teams should adopt a simpler workflow like GitHub flow instead. Git flow remains a reasonable choice for explicitly versioned software that maintains multiple releases in parallel.
Fast, trustworthy automated tests and a way to hide unfinished work — feature flags or branch-by-abstraction. Trunk-based development means everyone integrates small changes into one branch at least daily, so a broken trunk blocks the whole team; CI is its safety net, not an optional extra. The DORA/Accelerate research associated trunk-based development with elite delivery performance.
GitHub flow is usually the best starting point for teams under about ten people with a single deployed version: one main branch, short-lived feature branches and deploy-on-merge give the least process overhead. Move toward trunk-based development as deploy frequency and automation grow, or add release branches only when you must maintain several shipped versions.