What you'll learn
Quick Answer
GitHub Flow — short branches merged to main and deployed — suits most teams. Git Flow suits versioned software with scheduled releases. Trunk-based development suits large teams shipping continuously. Shorter-lived branches mean easier merges.
The underlying variable
All these workflows differ mainly in how long a branch lives before merging, and everything else follows.
A branch that lives two hours merges cleanly. A branch that lives three weeks diverges from main, accumulates conflicts, and becomes a genuinely difficult merge nobody wants to do — so it lives longer, which makes it worse.
That feedback loop is why every modern workflow pushes towards short branches. It is not aesthetic; it is that merge difficulty grows non-linearly with divergence.
So when comparing workflows, the question to ask is: how long does code sit unmerged, and what forces it to be integrated?
GitHub Flow: the sensible default
One long-lived branch, main, which is always deployable.
- Branch from main:
git switch -c feature/search-filter - Commit as you work, push regularly.
- Open a pull request, get review, let CI run.
- Merge to main.
- Deploy main.
That is the entire model, and it covers most teams and nearly every student project.
Its strength is simplicity — one rule to remember, and main is always the truth. Its requirement is discipline: main must always be deployable, which means CI and branch protection are not optional. See CI/CD with GitHub Actions.
Where it strains is when you must support several released versions simultaneously, which it has no concept of.
Git Flow: more structure, more overhead
Several long-lived branches with defined roles: main holds released code, develop is the integration branch, plus feature/*, release/* and hotfix/*.
Features merge to develop. When ready, a release branch is cut for stabilisation, then merged to both main and develop and tagged. Urgent fixes branch from main directly.
It was enormously influential and is now generally considered overkill for web applications. The reason is that it was designed for software with versioned releases — desktop applications, libraries, anything where users run a specific version and several versions are supported at once.
For a continuously deployed web application, it adds branches and merge overhead to solve a problem you do not have. If there is only ever one version in production, develop is a second main that delays integration.
Use it if you genuinely ship versioned releases. Otherwise its complexity is a cost with no matching benefit.
Trunk-based development
The other direction: commit to main directly, or through branches lasting hours rather than days. Some teams do not use branches at all.
The obvious objection is how you ship incomplete work. The answer is feature flags — merge the code disabled, enable it when ready. Integration and release become separate decisions, which is the key insight.
This is what large engineering organisations deploying many times a day use, and it is the strongest form of continuous integration: everyone integrates constantly, so conflicts are small and immediate.
It demands real infrastructure — comprehensive automated tests, feature flag tooling, and fast reliable CI. Without those, committing to main frequently is simply risky.
For a small team it is more achievable than it sounds, particularly if you already have decent tests.
Choosing, and the conventions that matter more
Solo or student project: GitHub Flow, or commit to main directly. Branch when you want to try something you might abandon.
Small team, web application: GitHub Flow with branch protection and required CI. This is the right answer for the large majority of teams.
Versioned or installed software: Git Flow, or a release-branch variant.
Large team, continuous deployment: trunk-based with feature flags.
Two conventions matter more than which workflow you pick:
- Keep branches short. A branch open longer than a few days should be split into smaller pieces.
- Protect main. Require review and passing CI. This single setting prevents most of what workflows are designed to prevent.
And know that git switch and git restore now replace the overloaded git checkout for branch and file operations — clearer, and worth adopting.