About GitHub for enterprises

Learn about GitHub's enterprise products and deployment options for GitHub Enterprise.

In this article

How enterprises use GitHub

GitHub is a complete developer platform to build, scale, and deliver secure software. Businesses use our products to support the entire software development lifecycle, increasing development velocity and improving code quality.

  • Track: Developers can store and version control your source code in repositories, using issues and projects to plan their work.
  • Code: Developers can code in GitHub Codespaces, a cloud-hosted development environment, review each other's code with pull requests, and use code security features to keep secrets and vulnerabilities out of your codebase.
  • Deploy: You can automate your build, test, and deployment pipeline with GitHub Actions and host software packages with GitHub Packages.

Benefits of GitHub Enterprise

GitHub Enterprise is our most comprehensive plan. In addition to the features included with a GitHub Free or GitHub Team plan for organizations, the plan includes:

  • Additional features such as SAML authentication and internal repositories. For a detailed list, see GitHub Pricing.
  • Extra allowances for usage-based products such as GitHub Actions.
  • An enterprise account, which provides a single place to manage billing and settings, enforce policies, and audit the people with access to your enterprise.
  • The option to add GitHub Advanced Security and GitHub Premium Support.

When businesses adopt GitHub Enterprise, their return on investment (ROI) is high. For example, their developers save 45 minutes per day, and onboarding and training time is reduced by 40%. See The Total Economic Impact of GitHub Enterprise.

About deployment options

When you purchase GitHub Enterprise, you get access to both GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Enterprise Server. You can choose to use one or both of these deployment options.

With GitHub Enterprise Cloud:

  • Your repositories and other resources are hosted on GitHub.com.
  • To access your resources, members of your enterprise can use their personal account or, if you use Enterprise Managed Users, you can provision accounts for users using an external system.

With GitHub Enterprise Server:

  • You run your own GitHub instance, either on-premises or on a public cloud service.
  • You create accounts for users, and authenticate users using either built-in authentication or an external system.
  • You can enable GitHub Connect to benefit from features that rely on GitHub.com, such as Dependabot alerts and actions hosted on GitHub.com.

Next steps

  1. Learn more about GitHub Enterprise.

  2. Set up a trial.

Further reading