Our main two differences from github is that we built banyan to be version control for "humans". Our mac application for example is extremely simple to use, and was designed with an 18 year old undergraduate/55 year old lab veteran in mind. Banyan was designed to be the middle ground of collaboration for users who know git with people who have no idea what git is (and in most cases, cant be bothered to learn another tool).
Our second difference is our focus on scientific specific tools like latex, ipython, etc.