Why are people migrating away from GitHub?
GitHub has been a central figure in the software world for some time now. Over the years, there have been some events that spurred users to switch to competing platforms, none more so than Microsoft’s acquistion of them in 2018! However, it has never been a mass exodus. I noticed some people migrating away from GitHub recently. I was curious to understand the rationale. Is it a blip or is it a sign of prolonged exodus?
Some organisations who migrated recently are:
Some developers who migrated recently are:
The common thread is that the usability of the platform has deteriorated. GitHub Actions has bugs that have become prohibitive to some users managing their CI pipeline efficiently. Workflow innovations such as stacked diffs have failed to make it into the platform.
The pricing model is out whack with developers. The rounding up of charges to the nearest minute for runners can prove costly to people who need to run a batch of small jobs frequently. The cherry on top was GitHub’s recent announcement on simpler pricing for GitHub Actions to be rolled out on January 1, 2026. In some cases there will be a reduction in the prices for GitHub-hosted runners, on the other hand they will begin charging for self-hosted runners. The latter move enraged people, why charge for something that is not running on GitHub?
On March 1, 2026, GitHub will introduce a new $0.002 per minute GitHub Actions cloud platform charge that will apply to self-hosted runner usage. Any usage subject to this charge will count toward the minutes included in your plan, as explained in our GitHub Actions billing documentation.
These are signs of the significant organisational change going on within GitHub. The focus has pivoted sharply towards LLMs and generative AI, in fact GitHub is now part of the CoreAI division of Microsoft. It appears that the autonomy that Microsoft promised for GitHub in 2018 is coming to an end. Its developer-first ethos seems to be fading too. Recently, now former GitHub CEO, Thomas Dohmke bluntly asserted that “either you embrace AI, or you get out of this career.” It is an uncompromising take on the trajectory of the industry. They are betting big on AI.
I don’t know if you’d say GitHub is enshittified, but it is striding forward in a more corporate manner. I think that individual developers and small organisations will be more prone to move, the ones whose priority is technical excellence from the infrastructure they use. They are more sensitive to pricing for tooling and may view GitHub’s pricing policies as too capricious. People with ethical objections will move. People who don’t want AI as a default across functionality will consider switching.
Generally though, people are adverse to change. GitHub is the default for the software industry and it will take a lot to dislodge them. I think its status as the default developer hub is being eroded and it will attract less new users over time. It will take more from competitors to make the case compelling for people to switch en masse.