* Git allows and encourages you to have multiple local branches that can be entirely independent of each other. The creation, merging, and deletion of those lines of development takes seconds. * Git is fast. With Git, nearly all operations are performed locally, giving it a huge speed advantage on centralized systems that constantly have to communicate with a server somewhere. * One of the nicest features of any Distributed SCM, Git included, is that it's distributed. This means that instead of doing a "checkout" of the current tip of the source code, you do a "clone" of the entire repository. * The data model that Git uses ensures the cryptographic integrity of every bit of your project. Every file and commit is checksummed and retrieved by its checksum when checked back out. It's impossible to get anything out of Git other than the exact bits you put in. * Git has something called the "staging area" or "index". This is an intermediate area where commits can be formatted and reviewed before completing the commit. * Git is released under the GNU General Public License version 2.0, which is an open source license. The Git project chose to use GPLv2 to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software---to make sure the software is free for all its users.

* Distributed architecture – Mercurial is truly distributed, giving each developer a local copy of the entire development history. This way it works independent of network access or a central server. Committing, branching and merging are fast and cheap. * Fast – Mercurial's implementation and data structures are designed to be fast. You can generate diffs between revisions, or jump back in time within seconds. Therefore Mercurial is perfectly suitable for large projects such as OpenJDK (hg) or NetBeans (hg). * Platform Independent – Mercurial was written with platform independence in mind. Therefore most of Mercurial is written in Python, with a small part in portable C for performance reasons. As a result, binary releases are available on all major platforms. * Extensible – The functionality of Mercurial can be increased with extensions, either by activating the official ones which are shipped with Mercurial or downloading some from the wiki or by writing your own. * Easy to use – Mercurial sports a consistent command set in which most subversion users feel right at home. Potentially dangerous actions are available via extensions you need to enable, so the basic interface is easy to use, easy to learn and hard to break.