GitHub is a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration. It offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. Unlike Git, which is strictly a command-line tool, GitHub provides a Web-based graphical interface and desktop as well as mobile integration.

The GitHub Application Programming Interface (API) is an another professional option for interfacing own apps or projects with GitHub. GitHub offers both plans for private repositories and free accounts, which are usually used to host open source software projects.

The GitHub platform, having more than 14 million users and more than 35 million repositories, is currently the largest host of source code in the world. At present, there are more than one million organizations on GitHub, among them Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, CRAN, RStudio, D3, Plotly and many more.

Since 2010 GitHub offers organizations which are commonly used to host open source software projects. Several plots showing growth of GitHub organizations over time are presented below.