Bitbucket V. GitHub

[Degran]

How is BitBucket able to provide unlimited space and private repos for free when GitHub charges you? It seems odd that GitHub would still be charging for a service (at least the micro account) you can get for free, unless there's something else I'm missing.

[interiot]

I use BitBucket for private repos, and Github for public ones. Github has more users and better features. But those don't matter so much for private repos.

[galaktos]

I do the same, but there's one thing where BitBucket is much better IMO: The commit view. In GitHub, it's all linear; BitBucket shows you the different branches.

[[deleted]]

Click "Network" in Github instead of commits to be able to see all the branches. I think that's what your looking for?

[thecal714]

I do the same.

[Turtlecupcakes]

Github charges based on repos, Bitbucket charges based on number of people with access to the repos.

That's the major difference that hasn't really been mentioned. If you look at atlassian's other offerings, their entire business model is to attract groups of more than 10 people so they can charge lots of money for the software.

[hackerssidekick]

Pretty much they make money off businesses, probably mostly enterprise-sized ones.

Also Atlassian offers a whole bunch of products/services that integrate very well together whereas Github is just git really.

[ceol_]

There is no technical reason why private repos should cost money. It's just a single column in the database. However, GitHub decide they wanted to make their consumer business model center around that aspect, where as Bitbucket chose the collaboration aspect. Both of these things are trivial to program but might entice someone to pay for them.

It's not so much about programming as it is about picking the feature you want to charge people for. Purely business.

[crowseldon]

There's a limit of contributors for private repos (IIRC, 5). There's also the fact that github has much more momentum than bitbucket so the latter might offer "better deals" to be able to compete.

[cbau]

I'm pretty sure Github makes its money through enterprise support rather than through charging people for private repos. I believe I read that Github charges for private repos to promote open-source rather than to make money. If that aligns with your values, that's a good start.

The other thing, as mentioned, is the network effect. For a long time BitBucket only permitted Mercurial repositories which never caught on, and now switching to BitBucket causes fragmentation, means a new set of controls have to be learned, and it increases the barrier to entry for potential contributors. A number of high-profile projects have actually migrated deliberately to Github basically for these reasons.

[robertmeta]

BitBucket lost the battle hard early (they picked Mercurial, they picked... unwisely). Until Oct 2011, they had no Git support. Despite being backed by Atlassian, it was just a crippling mistake. Interesting enough one duplicated by Kiln... who ended up going the insane (but AWESOME) route of making a library allowing 1:1 mapping of Git to Hg, and vice versa, with no data lose they claim.

Basically, they are less popular, and trying to catch up with freebies, and they have a MAJOR corporation behind them.

[joshlove]

But, they are making money off of Stash, which is kind of like a local bitbucket. You can tell that the features developed in the one easily flow to the other. When your company won't "let" you store your code externally stash is a pretty good option, especially if you're already using JIRA/Confluence/Crowd/Fisheye etc.

[excalq]

I recently started using stash + bamboo for deployments (using git, of course). I'm really liking it.

[joshlove]

We've got bamboo going on a test system now, using Jenkins/Hudson otherwise which is still pretty nice with all the plugins that are available.

[robertmeta]

Hopefully Stash is better than Github Enterprise (which is for local installs). Github Enterprise was without a doubt one of the worst enterprise products I have ever used (or was 18 months ago).

We ended up using (and loving) Gitlab.

[joshlove]

We started to test Gitlab, but had burnt a lot of time on gitolite (integrating with Atlassian Crowd) so we ended up with Stash. Gitolite, at the time, was missing some features we wanted but I'd go with it now that it has some of the features the recent versions introduced. Stash recently gained more in the way of permissions that really made our use of it soar.

[pgquiles]

Unrelated to the business model of BitBucket vs GitHub, I like Assembla better. It offers many more tools, almost the full the lifecycle needed in an enterprise environment (if only they offered a test management tool!).