There's no single correct branching strategy — the right one depends on team size, release cadence, and how much parallel work is normal. Three patterns cover most real projects:
main branch frequently, often multiple times a day, relying heavily on feature flags to hide unfinished work in production rather than long-lived branches to isolate it. Favors continuous integration and fast feedback; requires strong automated testing and comfort deploying frequently.main is always deployable, every change happens on a short-lived feature branch, and a pull request merges it back after review and passing checks. Simple, widely used for web apps and continuously deployed services, and the closest fit for smaller teams.develop and main branches, plus feature/, release/, and hotfix/ branch conventions with specific merge rules between them. Built for projects with scheduled, versioned releases (rather than continuous deployment) where "what's going into version 2.3" needs to be an explicit, stabilized set of changes rather than whatever happens to be on main at deploy time.| Workflow | Best fit | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Trunk-based | Continuous deployment, strong test/feature-flag culture | Requires discipline to avoid breaking main |
| GitHub Flow | Most web apps, small-to-medium teams | Less structure for coordinating multiple simultaneous releases |
| Git Flow | Scheduled/versioned releases, larger teams | More branches and ceremony to maintain |