Subversion
Ranked 6 of 26 version control systems by recommenders
Simple, reliable centralized version control with linear revision numbers, praised for large binary files and long uptime. Critics mainly cite painful branching and merging.
Simple, reliable centralized version control with linear revision numbers, praised for large binary files and long uptime. Critics mainly cite painful branching and merging.
109 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 54
- criticize it
- 55
- approval share
- 50%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 15 years
Median of the 4 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 54 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.9 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Handles large binaries well
“SVN was actually quite decent for game development, definitely more robust and (non-technical-) user-friendly than git+lfs.”
Comment from 17 Jun 2026 in “Epic Games announces Lore version control system” “IMO Subversion is still the best VCS when you have a lot of large binaries”
Comment from 4 May 2026 in “From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control” “svn is often considered due to issues that git has with large files”
Comment from 18 Jun 2026 in “Epic Games announces Lore version control system” - Comment from 18 Dec 2025 in “The immortality of Microsoft Word”
Straightforward and pleasant to use
“SVN was more straightforward to use, but that straightforwardness lost a lot in terms of fidelity.”
Comment from 17 Jun 2026 in “Epic Games announces Lore version control system” “SVN (subversion) was working excellent for my team”
Comment from 29 Apr 2026 in “Before GitHub” “I was already pretty happy with svn to be honest”
Comment from 14 Apr 2026 in “What is jj and why should I care?” - Comment from 17 Jun 2026 in “Epic Games announces Lore version control system”
Simple linear revision numbers
“I still love to have my one single unique global revisions number that is linearly increasing with each commit.”
Comment from 4 May 2026 in “From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control” “its simple linear history model was much easier to understand and use for most people”
Comment from 2 Aug 2026 in “GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement” “I loved the simple increasing numbers of Subversion.”
Comment from 4 May 2026 in “From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control” Reliable with almost no downtime
“I used subversion for 10 years and don’t ever recall a problem when it was offline”
Comment from 11 Apr 2026 in “We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git” “how their team was able to easily recover from that due to the nature of SVN”
Comment from 5 May 2026 in “AI didn't delete your database, you did” “There wasn’t any unscheduled downtime in a decade.”
Comment from 18 Aug 2026 in “Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Branching and merging are painful
“the implementation was riddled with problems and quite often the repo entered state where branches cannot merge back to main”
Comment from 18 Aug 2026 in “Incident with Github.com” “Branching in SVN is an ordeal that basically copies the whole project into a new folder”
Comment from 2 Aug 2026 in “GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement” “every Friday I would have to do The Merge, which would usually take most of the day”
Comment from 1 Aug 2026 in “GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement” Centralized, depends on server
“no way I'd go back to SVN after git, former are centralized and latter is distributed”
Comment from 4 Oct 2026 in “We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare” “Centralized servers worsened the problem by doing everything in a synchronous manner”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Blender 5.0” Seen as outdated technology
“I've seen people who haven't migrated off of SVN do okay (though personally I wouldn't punish myself like that)”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “GitLab Security Incident: Attempted Exploitation of CVE-2026-97229” “which is a dead and dying technology within 15-20 years of it being basically dead in most of tech”
Comment from 29 Dec 2025 in “Pre-commit hooks are fundamentally broken”
Other version control systems people recommend
The four most recommended other version control systems, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Git | 814 | 503 | 62% | 13 | 15 yrs42 owners | — |
| Jujutsu (jj) | 335 | 106 | 76% | 13 | 1 yr21 owners | Approved |
| Mercurial | 121 | 43 | 74% | 12 | 19 yrs7 owners | Approved |
| jj (Jujutsu) | 115 | 37 | 76% | 12 | 1 yr7 owners | Approved |
| SubversionThis page | 54 | 55 | 50% | 12 | 15 yrs4 owners | — |
What people said
40 of the 120 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I've seen people who haven't migrated off of SVN do okay (though personally I wouldn't punish myself like that)”
“SVN as the most reasonable middle ground between CVS and the decentralized concept of Git”
“no way I'd go back to SVN after git, former are centralized and latter is distributed”
“I have my dotfiles and other stuff checked into Subversion”
“There wasn’t any unscheduled downtime in a decade.”
“the implementation was riddled with problems and quite often the repo entered state where branches cannot merge back to main”
“Main branch was called master, and we were locking files by simply telling our teammates not to touch them.”
“its simple linear history model was much easier to understand and use for most people”
“Branching in SVN is an ordeal that basically copies the whole project into a new folder”
“every Friday I would have to do The Merge, which would usually take most of the day”
“Even good ole SVN is much better in that scenario than git”
“svn is often considered due to issues that git has with large files”
“SVN was actually quite decent for game development, definitely more robust and (non-technical-) user-friendly than git+lfs.”
“SVN was more straightforward to use, but that straightforwardness lost a lot in terms of fidelity.”
“svn was much more pleasant to use than git”
“people can just do this themselves with FTP/SVN/rsync and curlftpfs”
“how their team was able to easily recover from that due to the nature of SVN”
“No workarounds (using a local svn repo is extremely clunky) or external tools needed”
“IMO Subversion is still the best VCS when you have a lot of large binaries”
“I loved the simple increasing numbers of Subversion.”
“I still love to have my one single unique global revisions number that is linearly increasing with each commit.”
“SVN (subversion) was working excellent for my team”
“Version control was one of my favorite discoveries. I clung to SVN for the few years after I found it.”
“I was already pretty happy with svn to be honest”
“I used subversion for 10 years and don’t ever recall a problem when it was offline”
“Subversion was (and is) an admirable project, and filled a void by being much better than CVS.”
“I would still be using subversion if given the choice”
“I've never moved off it for any projects where I get to decide such things.”
“SVN fell from favour very quickly for good reason. But it had a few years in the sun.”
“it's a well made product. The market just didn't like it's architecture/UX”
“Having lived through sccs, pvcs, SourceSafe, Clearcase and svn (among others)”
“every morning every engineer would begin the day with syncing the Subversion repo”
“I kinda love SVN, it was a leap up from many popular solutions at the time.”
“you can rename files now? and branches aren't horrible? Great, how fast can we switch?”
“I had the "Best Homework Submission System" (said about Subversion of all things ...)”
“Subversion works ok over webdav, it has done it for decades.”
“which is a dead and dying technology within 15-20 years of it being basically dead in most of tech”
“Word + subversion or some other vcs that has good binary support”
“Centralized servers worsened the problem by doing everything in a synchronous manner”
“Svn has one great feature, you can checkout (clone) repo partially.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.