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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.
The Git Branching Strategy Comparison 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.
Pick your Team size, "How often do you release?" and CI / automation maturity, and tick the parallel-versions or compliance sign-off boxes if they apply.
Git flow, GitHub flow, trunk-based development and release branching are each scored against your answers, with the sentence behind every point shown.
Read the "Best fit for your answers" verdict and per-strategy reasoning, then click Copy result for your written recommendation.
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.