Apache Subversion or SVN is one of the most popular centralized version control systems. Now, SVN’s popularity is on the decrease, but there are still millions of projects stored in it. It can continue to be actively maintained by an open-source community. In SVN, you can check out a single version of the repository. It stores data in a central server. The drawback of the SVN is, it has the entire history on a local repository which limits you. You can only do commits, diffs, logs, branches, merges, file annotations, etc.
While, Git is a popular distributed version control system, which means that you can clone your repository. Thus you can get a complete copy of your entire history of that project. This means you can access all your commits.
Git has more advantages than SVN. It is much better for those developers who are not always connected to the master repository. Also, it is much faster than SVN.
To better understand the differences between Git and Subversion. Let’s have a look at following significance points.
| Git | SVN |
|---|---|
| It’s a distributed version control system. | It’s a Centralized version control system |
| Git is an SCM (source code management). | SVN is revision control. |
| Git has a cloned repository. | SVN does not have a cloned repository. |
| The Git branches are familiar to work. The Git system helps in merging the files quickly and also assist in finding the unmerged ones. | The SVN branches are a folder which exists in the repository. Some special commands are required For merging the branches. |
| Git does not have a Global revision number. | SVN has a Global revision number. |
| Git has cryptographically hashed contents that protect the contents from repository corruption taking place due to network issues or disk failures. | SVN does not have any cryptographically hashed contents. |
| Git stored content as metadata. | SVN stores content as files. |
| Git has more content protection than SVN. | SVN’s content is less secure than Git. |
| Linus Torvalds developed git for Linux kernel. | CollabNet, Inc developed SVN. |
| Git is distributed under GNU (General public license). | SVN is distributed under the open-source license. |
