I'd say Mercurial because 1. in terms of design, performance and features it's about as good as git. sure it may be missing this or that but see point 5 below

I'd say Mercurial because 1. in terms of design, performance and features it's about as good as git. sure it may be missing this or that but see point 5 below. 2. in terms of end-user complexity it's about as easy to use as svn (which everybody knows) 3. 99% of the code is in cleanly written Python and highly portable 4. http://bitbucket.org http://bitbucket.org is great and they offer SSL for free private repositories (at github only paid plans offer SSL) 5. it's easy to hack (provided you know Python) I'll grant that the last point may not matter to the lone web developer but personally I like things that make it easy for me to tinker with them when I want or need to.