When is it recommended to use Git rebase vs. Git merge?

Do I still need to merge after a successful rebase?

Short Version

• Merge takes all the changes in one branch and merges them into another branch in one commit.
• Rebase says I want the point at which I branched to move to a new starting point

So when do you use either one?

Merge

• Let's say you have created a branch for the purpose of developing a single feature. When you want to bring those changes back to master, you probably want merge.

Rebase

• A second scenario would be if you started doing some development and then another developer made an unrelated change. You probably want to pull and then rebase to base your changes from the current version from the repository.

Squashing: All commits are preserved in both cases (for example: "add feature", then "typo", then "oops typo again"...). Commits can be combined into a single commits by squashing. Squashing can be done as part of a merge or rebase operation (--squash flag), in which case it's often called a squash-merge or a squash-rebase.

Pull Requests: Popular git servers (Bitbucket, GitLab, GitHub, etc...) allow to configure how pull requests are merged on a per-repo basis. the UI may show a "Merge" button by convention but the button can do any operations with any flags (keywords: merge, rebase, squash, fast-forward).