Naughty or Nice? GitHub vs. Azure DevOps in the Age of GenAI and Agentic AI

Stephen Tulp
December 4, 2025

8 minutes to read

Microsoft acquired GitHub in October 2018; suddenly, the world’s largest open-source platform and the enterprise-focused Azure DevOps were under the same roof. The debate between GitHub and Azure DevOps became a hot topic of discussion, with many wondering if one would cannibalise the other. The traditional dichotomy established early on was simple: use Azure DevOps for robust enterprise planning, complex release pipelines, and deep integration with the Microsoft ecosystem, and use GitHub for code hosting, open-source collaboration, and a more community-driven developer experience.

However, the emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) and Agentic capabilities has fundamentally altered this landscape, shifting the conversation from “features” to “intelligence.” It is no longer just about where you store your code, how you track your tasks, or how robust your pipelines are; it is about which platform empowers developers with the most advanced AI assistants and autonomous agents. The battleground has moved to who can provide the best “AI-native” developer experience, reducing toil and accelerating innovation through intelligent code completion, automated pull request reviews, and agents that can autonomously diagnose and fix build failures.

Azure DevOps

The Enterprise Workhorse. Unmatched for complex project management (Azure Boards), hierarchical reporting, and granular permission models. It was the safe choice for large organisations with rigid compliance needs. The barrier to entry for Azure DevOps was quite low, and enabling a new organisation was relatively straightforward.

Because of how easy it was to enable, the structural hierarchy, specifically the relationship between Organisations and Projects, was often misunderstood. For a long time, I would always go down the path of creating a new project for an initiative, when in reality, a repo in an existing project was the way to go. This confusion frequently leads to sprawl and technical debt, where companies find themselves with fragmented reporting, disjointed permissions, and isolated backlogs that are difficult to consolidate later.

At its core, Azure DevOps has a strict hierarchy covering Organisations, Projects and Teams.

The Organisation (The Hard Boundary)

The Organisation is the highest level of isolation and controls:

Billing: Licenses (Basic, Test Plans) are managed here.
Identity: Connected to a single Microsoft Entra ID tenant.
Data Sovereignty: Resides in a specific Azure region (e.g., Australia East).
Isolation: You can’t easily query work items, share code, or link pipelines across organisational boundaries.

The Project (The Process Boundary)

The Project is where most of the confusion lies. Is it a software project? A business unit? A product?

Process Templates: This is where you define work item types (Agile, Scrum, CMMI). It becomes quite hard to mix processes within a project easily.
Security Boundary: Permissions are heavily scoped to the Project level.
Service Connections: Connections to Azure Subscriptions are often scoped here.

The Team (The Agile Boundary)

Teams are the flexible layer. You can have hundreds of teams within a single Project.

Backlogs: Each team gets its own backlog view, filtered from the Project’s total work.
Boards: Each team gets its own Kanban/Sprint board.

The DevOps Governance repo was what I used to understand the integration points between Entra ID, Azure DevOps and Azure Resource Manager and provides some good examples that you can use as a foundation to build upon.

GitHub

The Developer / Engineer’s Home is superior for code collaboration, community engagement, and a cleaner, more modern user interface (in my opinion!). It prioritises the developer experience, community collaboration, and inner-sourcing. It feels more like a social network for code (stars, forks, discussions etc.).

A key difference from a hierarchical perspective is that GitHub aligns with a network model, where repositories are the center and everything else revolves around them. There is no concept of projects in GitHub (in relation to boundaries); the repos themselves sit under the organisation. GitHub Issues also sit within the repo, and then GitHub Projects provide cross-repo grouping of issues.

The other differences that GitHub provides include GitHub CodeSpace, Advanced Security (even though it is now in Azure DevOps, to me it feels like a bolt-on, rather than an integrated experience). Then, some of the latest announcements around GitHub Agent HQ, Mission Control and all the new custom AI agent capabilities that are on the list to explore more.

How about a Hybrid Approach?

When I was younger, there was a TV ad for Old El Paso that went viral, well as viral as things could be in the mid-2000s. The main punch line was the catchphrase Why Don’t We Have Both?

Incoming mariachi music

I have been involved in a few engagements where the customer was using Azure DevOps but also had GitHub Enterprise; most of these engagements were set up with either:

Azure DevOps Boards and GitHub for everything else, or
Azure DevOps Boards and Azure Pipelines, and GitHub Repos for source control

The latter became popular with the introduction of GitHub Advanced Security because, at the time, Defender for Cloud DevOps wasn’t a thing yet.

I recently watched an Ignite session BRK106 - AI Powered Workflows with GitHub and Azure DevOps, where the narrative around “Better Together” was backed up with announcements on tighter integration, optimisation and performance improvements when running in a hybrid mode. If you are interested in knowing more about this, I would highly recommend watching the session.

From what I took out of the Ignite sessions that I have watched so far, most of the AI investments are centred on GitHub, encouraging users to move repositories there for advanced tooling such as Copilot, CodeSpaces, and enhanced security, while maintaining workflows in Azure Boards and Pipelines.

The Verdict?

Does it make sense to continue investment, engineering and support for both platforms? Will they ever merge the two? The licensing overhead and cost of both seem to be changing to be more cost-effective, and Microsoft won’t want to alienate existing Azure DevOps customers by making it too hard to leverage these AI investments in GitHub.

Well, that was a very ‘consultant’ answer… My recommendation would be:

Azure DevOps: If you are already using Azure DevOps and are happy with what it provides, and you are taking a slower approach to leveraging AI into your workflows, then no reason to do anything at this stage.
GitHub: If you are a Greenfield deployment and not using either, then I would jump straight to GitHub and get the benefit of the new capabilities, spend some time defining processes around the use of GitHub Projects and Issues (in the absence of having Azure DevOps Boards).
Hybrid: If you are invested in Azure DevOps Boards and have mature dashboards, but you are keen to explore the latest AI capabilities, then a hybrid approach makes sense: move Azure DevOps Repos to GitHub Repos and start leveraging GitHub functionality.

Conclusion

The choice between GitHub and Azure DevOps has evolved beyond a simple feature comparison of Boards vs. Issues. It now represents a strategic divergence: one path prioritises legacy compliance and complex reporting structures, often at the expense of AI innovation. The other path embraces the future, empowering engineering teams to leverage the full potential of GitHub Copilot and AI capabilities.

Fortunately, these paths are not mutually exclusive. A bridge exists, allowing organisations to maintain their established governance in Azure DevOps while unlocking the AI-driven velocity of GitHub.