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If you are considering using GitHub as a source code hosting and collaboration platform for your new projects or migrating projects from other DevOps platforms, it’s essential to understand the concept of accounts, plans, billing, offerings, and pricing models on the GitHub platform. These aspects play a crucial role in making informed decisions about utilizing GitHub effectively.
In this first article we will explore the different types of GitHub accounts and in a second one we will explain the different plans and billing.
Currently, there are three types of GitHub accounts.
- Personal accounts
- Organization accounts
- Enterprise accounts
Let’s delve into each one.
Personal accounts
Your personal account is your identity on GitHub.com, you can manage your personal account including email preferences, access to personal repositories, and organizational memberships.
Personal GitHub accounts are the fundamental way for participating in the platform and managing software development projects. As detailed on the official website, every person who uses GitHub.com signs in to a personal account.
With a personal account, you can create and manage your own repositories, collaborate with other developers on open source and private projects, and access a variety of GitHub tools and features.
Notice that a personal account has a limited feature set, will depend on the selected plan, which will be explained in next articles.
Ref: Setting up and managing your personal account on GitHub
Organization accounts
Organizational accounts are designed to facilitate collaboration on development teams and projects and to have your own resources such as repositories, packages and projects.
An important aspect is that the organization’s owners and security officers can manage the organization’s configuration. They can also control user access to projects, code repositories, and data.
Unlike personal accounts, organizational accounts are intended for groups, companies or entities looking to centrally manage their code repositories.
From a GitHub user’s point of view, you can’t sign into an organization directly. Instead, each personal account can be a member of multiple organizations. Therefore, each person signs into their own personal account, and any actions they take on organization resources are attributed to their personal account.
You can see and manage your organizations in the GitHub panel
Ref: Managing your membership in organizations
Enterprise accounts
Enterprise accounts are essential for larger companies and projects enabling structured management and optimized workflow in software development. This allows administrators to centrally manage policies and billing for multiple organizations. Additionally, they enable inner sourcing between their organizations. Moreover, enterprise accounts can invite existing organizations to join your enterprise account, transfer organizations between enterprise accounts, or create new organizations.
In a nutshell, enterprise accounts are ideal for companies that require a higher level of customization, policies, security, compliance, governance and auditability in their collaborative development process.
GitHub provides two types of Enterprise products:
GitHub Enterprise Cloud: it’s a Software as a Service cloud-based solution provided and managed by GitHub and the GitHub engineers takes care of the infrastructure administration, evolution and maintenance of the cloud platform.
GitHub Enterprise Server: it’s an on-prem solution allows organizations to deploy their own private instance of GitHub on their servers. It’s suitable for use by enterprises that are subject to regulatory compliance, which helps to avoid issues that arise from software development platforms in the public cloud.
In this context, GitHub Enterprise Server runs on your infrastructure. It is governed by access and security controls that you define, such as firewalls, network policies, IAM, monitoring, and VPNs.
You can see your enterprise accounts and associations in the GitHub panel.
Ref: About GitHub for enterprises
Conclusion
In this article we have briefly explained how to become familiar with the different types of GitHub accounts to meet the needs of individual users, teams and companies.
In this sense, as we will explain in detail in the next article, it’s recommended to explore the different GitHub plans options to choose the right plan for your organization and to know the billing model of the contracted services.
References
GitHub Accounts: Types of GitHub accounts – GitHub Docs
Personal account: Setting up and managing your personal account
Organizations accounts: About organizations Docs
GitHub for enterprises: About GitHub for enterprises
GitHub for enterprise Cloud: About GitHub Enterprise Cloud
