A complete GitHub overview for 2025: Features, pricing, and more

If you’ve been anywhere near the tech world, you’ve heard of GitHub. It’s pretty much the go-to place for developers building, shipping, and maintaining software, with millions of people and companies using it every single day.

But here’s the thing: if you think GitHub is just a tool for coders, you’re missing a big part of the picture. Its collaboration and project management tools can be incredibly useful for non-technical teams, too, especially in areas like customer support and IT. This GitHub overview will break down what it is, what its key features are, how much it costs, and where it fits in a modern company’s toolkit.

What is GitHub and how is it different from Git?

Before we get into the weeds, let’s clear something up that trips up a lot of newcomers: Git and GitHub are not the same thing. Understanding the difference is the first step to seeing what the platform can really do.

Git: The engine under the hood

Git is an open-source "version control system." The simplest way to think about it is like a super-powered "track changes" for code. It lets developers save snapshots (called "commits") of their work, create different versions ("branches") to test out new ideas without breaking anything, and then merge those changes back in. It’s a powerful command-line tool that runs on a developer’s own computer.

GitHub: The collaborative hub in the cloud

GitHub is a web-based service that gives those Git repositories a home. If Git is the engine, GitHub is the whole car built around it, complete with a dashboard, seats for your team, and a GPS. It puts a friendly interface on top of Git and adds a bunch of tools designed for teamwork, like pull requests, issue tracking, and project boards.

Key features for modern teams

GitHub is way more than a digital filing cabinet for code. It’s packed with features designed to make teamwork, well, work. These can be adapted for all kinds of workflows, not just shipping software.

Repositories, branches, and pull requests

At the core of GitHub are three concepts that make working together possible:

• Repositories (Repos): A repo is just a project’s main folder. It holds all the project files (code, images, documents, you name it) and, importantly, the entire history of every single change ever made.

• Branching: Think of this like creating a safe copy of your project to work on a new feature or fix. It lets you make changes in isolation without messing with the main, live version. It’s a sandbox for experimentation.

• Pull Requests (PRs): This is where the collaborative magic really happens. A pull request is basically a formal way of saying, "Hey, I’m done with my changes on this branch. Can someone take a look before we merge it into the main project?" It creates a space where your team can review the work, leave comments, and give the thumbs-up before it goes live. This process is amazing for reviewing changes to knowledge base articles or website copy, not just code.

Project management: Issues and Projects

GitHub isn’t just for managing the code itself; it’s also for tracking all the work that happens around the code.

• Issues: These are basically trackable tasks. You can use them for bug reports, feature requests, or just a simple to-do list. Each issue is its own little conversation with assignees, labels, and comments.

• Projects: This feature gives you a Kanban-style board (think Trello or Jira) where you can drag and drop your Issues and PRs into columns like "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done." It offers a nice, high-level view of what everyone is working on.

Here’s where things get interesting for support teams. Imagine a customer reports a bug through your help desk, like Zendesk or Jira Service Management. An agent then has to create an issue for the engineering team in GitHub. Doing this by hand involves a lot of copying and pasting, which is slow and makes it easy to miss important details. This is the kind of gap a tool like eesel AI is designed to fill, by connecting your help desk to GitHub so you can create a detailed issue from a customer ticket in one click.

Automating workflows: Actions and integrations

Let’s talk about automation. GitHub has a powerful way to automate developer workflows, but it’s important to understand what it’s good at and where its limits are, especially for teams outside of engineering.

What are GitHub Actions?

GitHub Actions is an automation tool that helps you build, test, and deploy code directly from GitHub. You can set up custom workflows that kick off when certain things happen. For example, when a developer pushes new code, an Action can automatically run tests to check for bugs. If everything looks good, another Action could push the code to a live server. It’s a huge time-saver for developers.

Limitations for support teams

But here’s the catch: GitHub Actions were built by developers, for developers. Setting them up involves writing configuration code in special files (YAML), and they are laser-focused on automating tasks related to the software lifecycle.

Trying to automate support workflows, like triaging tickets, finding answers in old conversations, or updating a customer in Zendesk, is a completely different beast. You could technically try to build this with GitHub Actions, but it would require a ton of custom code and ongoing maintenance from your engineers, pulling them away from working on your actual product.

Bridging the gap with purpose-built AI

This is where you need a tool that’s built for the job. While GitHub is busy automating the code side of things, an AI platform can automate the support side.

An AI platform like eesel AI is a no-code solution that plugs directly into your support tools. It’s designed to be set up in minutes, not months, without taking up any developer time. You can easily connect knowledge from sources like Confluence or Google Docs and automate actions in your help desk, a task that would be a massive, time-sucking project to tackle with GitHub Actions.

This video provides a helpful walkthrough of the essential steps for using GitHub, from creating repositories to managing your projects.

Account types and pricing (2025)

Alright, let’s talk money. GitHub has a few different plans, so you can pick what makes the most sense for your team’s size and needs. Here’s a quick look at the main options.

For individuals and small teams

• Free: The free plan is fantastic. It’s perfect for students, solo developers, or small teams just getting their feet wet. It comes with unlimited public and private repos, 2,000 Actions minutes per month, and access to all the project management tools. It’s more than enough to get going.

• Team: At $4 per user per month, the Team plan adds features for professional teams. You get things like protected branches (which lets you require code reviews before merging changes) and more Actions minutes (3,000 per month).

For large organizations

• Enterprise: Starting at $21 per user per month, this plan is for large companies that need serious security, compliance, and admin features. It includes things like SAML single sign-on, enterprise-level support, a whopping 50,000 Actions minutes, and the choice between cloud hosting or running it on your own servers.

| Feature | Free | Team | Enterprise | | :---------------------– | :------------------------ | :------------------------------ | :------------------------------------------ | | Price | $0 | $4 / user / month | $21 / user / month | | Private Repositories | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | | Collaborators | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | | GitHub Actions | 2,000 mins/month | 3,000 mins/month | 50,000 mins/month | | Code Review | Basic | Required Reviewers | Advanced Policies | | Security | Standard | Standard + Protected Branches | Advanced (SAML SSO, Audit Log) | | Best For | Individuals & Open Source | Professional Teams | Large Organizations |

Bringing it all together with your other tools

GitHub is the source of truth for your code, but let’s be real, your company’s most important knowledge is probably scattered across a dozen other apps. To provide great support, you have to connect those dots.

The challenge: Trapped knowledge and manual work

Think about it. Your engineering team’s knowledge lives in GitHub issues and internal wikis. Your support team’s wisdom is buried in past Zendesk tickets and macros. Your official product docs are sitting in Confluence or Notion.

This forces your support agents to play detective, hopping between multiple systems just to find one answer. It’s slow, frustrating for your team, and leads to inconsistent answers for your customers.

Unify your knowledge and automate support with eesel AI

This is exactly the problem a tool like eesel AI is built to solve. Think of it as a central brain for all your company knowledge.

• Unify Knowledge: eesel AI connects to and learns from all your scattered apps: GitHub, past support tickets, help centers, you name it. It builds a single source of truth that understands your business, your products, and your customers’ problems.

• Automate Confidently: Because it learns from everything, eesel AI’s agents can provide accurate, context-aware answers. The best part? It has a powerful simulation mode that lets you test how the AI will perform on thousands of your past tickets before it ever talks to a live customer. This gives you the confidence to actually flip the switch on automation, something you just can’t get with generic tools.

eesel AI connects to all your apps, including GitHub, to create a single source of truth for support.

GitHub is essential, but it’s not the only tool you need

So, let’s wrap this up. This GitHub overview shows it’s a powerhouse platform for any team that works with code. Its tools for version control, project management, and developer automation are top-notch.

But it’s not a silver bullet for everything. Its focus is squarely on the engineering world. For customer-facing or internal support, relying on GitHub alone creates information gaps and requires developers to build and maintain clunky workarounds.

The most effective teams use GitHub for what it does best (managing code) and pair it with a purpose-built AI platform like eesel AI to handle customer and employee support. By connecting your GitHub knowledge with your help desk and internal docs, you create a smooth flow of information that empowers your support team, cuts down on manual work, and leads to a much better customer experience.

Ready to bridge the gap between your engineering and support teams? Get started with eesel AI for free and see how you can unify your knowledge in minutes.