Fork vs. Branch: One Team, One Repository

You need to work on a new feature or fix a bug. You open up the project and face a choice: do you create a fork or a branch?

It’s a simple question with huge consequences for your team's sanity (most of all, your QA's), collaboration, and the overall tidiness of your project. Let's break it down.

The Contenders: What Are They?

Imagine your project repository is a massive, well-tended garden, with the main branch being the central trunk of the main tree.

🌿 Branches: Working in the Same Garden

A branch is a new path that splits off from the main trunk but remains inside the same garden. It's a lightweight, temporary workspace to develop a feature. Everyone working in the garden can see the path, walk down it, and collaborate. When the work is done, the path is neatly merged back into the main trunk.

🍴 Forks: Cloning the Entire Garden

A fork is a complete, personal copy of the entire garden, planted in your own separate backyard. You are the owner of this new garden. You can do whatever you want in it without affecting the original. If you want to contribute your changes back, you have to formally submit a "pull request," asking the original gardeners to incorporate your work.

At a Glance: Which One to Choose?

Choose a branch if...	Choose a fork if...
You are on a trusted team working on the same project.	You are contributing to an open-source project you don't have write access to.
You need to start work quickly and efficiently.	You are starting a new, distinct project based on an existing one.
You want seamless collaboration with your teammates.	You need complete isolation (issues, permissions, CI/CD) from the original.
You value a single source of truth for all ongoing work.	You are conducting a long-term, high-risk experiment that may never be merged.
You want to keep your repository clean and free of clutter.	The original project's license is changing and you want to preserve a version.

The Default Winner: Always Branch First

For teams working together on a private or internal project, the choice is simple:

Rule of Thumb

Always prefer creating a branch over a fork.

Forking might seem like a good way to keep your work isolated, but for a trusted team, it creates more problems than it solves.

• Feather-light & Fast: Branching is instantaneous and uses virtually no extra disk space on the server 🪶. Forking copies the entire repository history, which can be slow and consume significant storage.
• Collaboration Made Easy: With branches, everyone has direct access to the latest code in one place. Keeping a fork's main updated with the original project (by merging or rebasing) can become a difficult task as the fork drags on.
• One Single Source of Truth: As more people create forks, information gets scattered across dozens of disconnected repositories. Who is working on what? Is this fork up to date? With branches, everything lives in the main repository, making code reviews and project management straightforward.
• Keeps the Project Tidy: A branch is automatically deleted after it's merged, leaving no trace 🧹. Forks hang around forever, with read-only access unless you manually delete them, creating a graveyard of old, forgotten repositories.

How to Keep Your Branching Workflow Clean

To make branching truly effective, you should configure your repository to automate cleanup and maintain a clean history. The specific settings vary by platform (GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps), but the principles are the same.

Recommended Repository Settings

Here are the ideal principles for a clean, branch-based workflow.

• Enforce Squash on Merge

  • Why? A feature branch might have dozens of small "wip" or "fixup" commits. Squashing combines them into a single, meaningful commit on the main branch. This keeps the project history high-level and readable. Look for settings like "Squash Merging" and make it the default or required option.

• Prefer Fast-Forward Merges

  • Why? This avoids creating a "merge bubble" commit for every merge. A fast-forward merge places your squashed commit directly onto the target branch, resulting in a perfectly linear and clean history.

• Automatically Delete Head Branches

  • Why? As soon as a feature is merged, the branch has served its purpose. This automatically cleans up old branches, preventing "branch clutter" in the repository. Most platforms have a checkbox for this in the repository settings.

• Use a Standardized Merge/Squash Commit Message

  • Why? A standardized template ensures every commit on main contains vital information for auditing and automatic changelog generation. Most platforms allow you to configure a default message that pulls in the pull request title and description.

The Exception: When to Actually Fork

Forks are not evil; they are just a specialized tool. You should only create a fork when you have a clear and specific need for a completely separate project environment.

• Contributing to Open Source
  • This is the classic use case. If you don't have write permissions to a project, you fork it, make your changes, and submit a pull request. There isn't another way around.
• Starting a Spin-Off Project
  • When you want to take an existing project in a completely new direction and create a distinct "flavor" that will have its own life, team, and rules... And will probably never merge back to the parent. This is exactly how a loooot of open-source projects see the day right before the original repository goes closed-source.
• Total Project Isolation is Required
  • When you need a separate issue tracker, reviewers, team, container registry, CI/CD rules, and permissions that are completely independent of the original project for a given milestone.
• Long-Term, High-Risk Experiments (PoCs)
  • When you need a safe sandbox for a Proof of Concept or a risky feature that might take months to develop and may never be merged back.

If your reason isn't on this list, you should probably be using a branch.