Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. Developed by Selenic
License: Open Source
Mercurial SCM is an open-source version control system that excels in ease of use and branching capabilities, making it ideal for smaller projects and teams. In contrast, Perforce is designed for larger teams and projects, offering superior performance with large repositories and robust support for binary files, but comes with a steeper learning curve and licensing costs.