* 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.

* Tracks revisions to files, changesets, and history * Has a portable design * It can import CVS projects * Easy to learn * Good documentation and low maintenance