Teams compare these two most often when deciding where a side project or a company website should live, but they bill for different things.
TL;DR
GitHub sells the repository and the compute around it: Free at $0 for unlimited public and private repositories, Team at $4 per user a month as listed for the first 12 months, Enterprise from $21 per user, with Codespaces at $0.18 an hour of compute and $0.07 per GB a month of storage, and Git LFS at $5 a month for 50 GB of bandwidth and 50 GB of storage. Netlify sells deployment: Free at $0 with 300 credits a month, Personal at $9 with 1,000 credits for one member, Pro at $20 with unlimited members, extra credits at $5 per 500 or $10 per 1,500. Pick GitHub to host and review code; pick Netlify to build and serve a site from it.
GitHub's pricing page is per user and per resource. The free plan is $0 forever and covers unlimited public and private repositories, which is where most projects start. Team is listed at $4 per user a month, with the page marking the rate as applying for the first 12 months, and Enterprise starts at $21 per user with the same introductory marking, bundled with security, compliance and deployment controls. Compute is priced separately: Codespaces starts at $0.18 an hour of compute and $0.07 per GB a month of storage, and Git Large File Storage is $5 a month for 50 GB of bandwidth and 50 GB of storage.
Netlify's page is per site and per credit rather than per user. Free is $0 forever and includes framework deploys, a global CDN, basic rate limiting and a 300-credit monthly limit. Personal at $9 a month covers one member with 1,000 credits, smart secret detection and priority email support. Pro at $20 a month covers unlimited members and is flagged as the best value, with additional credits purchasable at $5 per 500 or $10 per 1,500. Build concurrency and extras are metered too: one concurrent build on the lower tiers with additional ones at $40 each, and agent runners or extensions billed per use.
| Feature | GitHub | Netlify |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | $0 forever with unlimited public and private repositories | $0 forever with a global CDN and 300 credits a month |
| Entry paid plan | Team at $4 per user a month, marked as the first 12 months | Personal at $9 a month for one member, 1,000 credits |
| Mid tier | Enterprise from $21 per user a month with security and compliance controls | Pro at $20 a month with unlimited members |
| Billing unit | Per user, plus metered compute and storage | Per site, metered in credits |
| Metered extras | Codespaces from $0.18 an hour and $0.07 per GB a month; LFS $5 a month for 50 GB | Additional credits at $5 per 500 or $10 per 1,500; extra concurrent builds at $40 each |
| Main job | Host, review and secure source code | Build, deploy and serve web projects |
| Team cost driver | Headcount — every user is a seat | Traffic and builds — Pro covers unlimited members |
| Platform | Web application, desktop apps, CLI | Web dashboard, CLI, Git integration |
| Offline mode | Not applicable: hosted service | Not applicable: hosted service |
| Enterprise terms | From $21 per user a month with security, compliance and deployment controls | Custom terms negotiated with sales |
Pick GitHub if
GitHub keeps the repository, the pull request, the packages and the access rules in one per-user account, and the free tier already allows unlimited private projects. Teams that need review history and organization-wide controls will pay per head here and treat deployment as a separate decision.
Pick Netlify if
Netlify charges for builds and delivery instead of seats, so adding reviewers or stakeholders on the $20 Pro plan does not change the invoice. Anyone shipping a marketing site, a documentation portal or a front-end application usually wants this bill even while the code itself stays hosted somewhere else.
No independent reviews or user ratings were collected for GitHub or Netlify on this page; the bullets are each vendor's own plan wording from github.com/pricing and netlify.com/pricing, and every figure here comes from those two pages.
Only partially. GitHub hosts repositories, reviews and permissions on a per-user basis; Netlify builds and serves web projects on a credit basis with unlimited members on Pro. Most teams use a repository host plus a deploy platform, so the real question is which layer each tool should cover.
GitHub Team for five users is $20 a month at the listed $4 per user rate. Netlify Pro is $20 a month for unlimited members, with 300-credit and pool allowances covering builds. The two converge at that size — the difference is what the money buys: seats and code hosting versus builds and delivery.
GitHub's free plan covers repositories, and its paid tiers add security and compliance controls rather than a deploy product on the pricing page. Netlify's plans are the ones that publish build credits, a global CDN, rate limiting and deploy concurrency, which is why static and front-end projects are usually pointed there.
GitHub meters resources: Codespaces starts at $0.18 an hour of compute and $0.07 per GB a month of storage, and Git LFS is $5 a month for 50 GB of bandwidth with 50 GB of storage. Netlify meters credits: 300 a month on free, 1,000 on Personal, pooled allowances on Pro, with top-ups at $5 per 500 or $10 per 1,500.
Growing codebases usually want GitHub Enterprise from $21 per user a month for security, compliance and deployment controls across teams. Growing traffic usually wants Netlify Pro at $20 a month with unlimited members, because the bill follows builds and requests instead of headcount.
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