What is Mercurial?
Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface.
Mercurial pricing
We don't have Mercurial's full plan breakdown yet (its pricing page resisted automated reading). Here's what we could confirm. Always check live pricing for exact numbers.
What Mercurial does
The capabilities that matter for version control, normalised so it lines up with every alternative. “-” means we haven't confirmed it, not that it's missing.
- VCS model
- Distributed
- Underlying VCS supported (Git / Mercurial / SVN / Perforce / multiple)
- Mercurial
- Hosting
- Self-hosted only
- Code review
- -
- Large-file / binary handling
- -
- Monorepo scale (partial clone / sparse / VFS)
- -
- Built-in CI
- -
- Access control granularity
- -
- Federation / decentralisation (ActivityPub / email)
- -
- Open-source core
- Open-source
- Self-managed license model
- Free
- API surface (REST / GraphQL / webhooks)
- -
- SSO / SAML / SCIM
- -
- Signed commits / supply-chain (GPG / SSH / sigstore)
- -
Platform & deployment
Independently observed- CLI
- Self-hosted
Mercurial alternatives
Other version control we track, ranked by the same independent score.
- GitA free and open source distributed version control systemlow · 6%
- ForgejoBeyond coding. We forge.low · 3%
- GerritThe open source, patchset based, code review platform for Git-based developmentlow · 29%
- FossilA Coherent Software Configuration Management Systemlow · 14%
- Apache SubversionEnterprise-class centralized version control for the masseslow · 10%
- GiteaPrivate, Fast, Reliable DevOps Platformlow · 34%
The Vioscale score: one lens on the evidence
Not user reviews and not a paid placement: a confidence-weighted blend of the independent signals below (adoption, activity, security posture, and more), which you can sort and re-weight yourself. Vendors can correct their listing but can never move their rank, and stars are weighted low as a vanity metric. It is one way to read the evidence for Mercurial, not the verdict.
| Signal | Score | Weight | Contribution | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Package Downloads | 64 | 26.00 | 1668.1 | ✓ |
| Capabilities | 0 | 16.00 | 0.0 | - |
| Github Stars | 0 | 5.00 | 0.0 | - |
| Integrations | 0 | 8.00 | 0.0 | - |
| Github Activity | 0 | 18.00 | 0.0 | - |
| Release Cadence | 0 | 10.00 | 0.0 | - |
| Security Posture | 0 | 13.00 | 0.0 | - |
| Stackoverflow Activity | 0 | 12.00 | 0.0 | - |
Computed . Re-weight it by intent, or see the full method.
All data & sourcesshow ↓
Every value we hold, with its source, retrieval date, and confidence. This is the evidence behind the score: don't trust it, verify it.
Adoption
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Package downloads weekly | 86,972 | highsource · 2026-08-01 · 85% |
Features
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Capabilities | {"hosting":"self","vcs_model":"distributed","license_model":"free","underlying_vcs":"Mercurial","open_source_core":"open_source"} | mediumsource · 2026-08-01 · 60% |
Language
| Attribute | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Primary | Python | highsource · 2026-08-01 · 80% |