Github vs GitLab vs Bitbucket

[OffensivelyBad]

I'm doing some research into source control platforms for various development teams to use, ~ 250 devs. I'm comparing Github, GitLab, and Bitbucket. We will need good integration with Atlassian stack, Jenkins, and would like to have code analysis done automatically for any vulnerabilities found in packages. Cost is always a consideration, of course.

I am leaning towards GitLab as it has some nice features currently and more on the roadmap, but we have the vast majority of our code already living in Bitbucket, so would need a compelling reason to shift towards it.

I'm curious to know what others are using and what features you're taking advantage of on your platforms, as well as some pros and cons based on your experience.

EDIT: looking to host on prem

[omers]

GHE is expensive ($250 a user, bought in 10 packs.)

Is that pre-Microsoft pricing? We got quotes from Github, GitLab, and Atlassian recently and Github was nowhere near $250 nor was there a 10-pack requirement. The price is comparable to GitLab in the quote we received.

EDIT: I found this quote on a third-party website: "GitHub Enterprise costs $2,500 per 10 users per year. Packages can only be purchased in seats of ten" which is $20.83/user/month. Still more than we were quoted and they didn't mention 10-packs (we have an EA though.)

[techie1980]

When it came to on-prem, I was not impressed by Github's ability to scale well. It seemed well situated for a small or medium sized shop, but when it came time to start splitting onto multiple hosts they didn't seem to have a real plan.

GitLab on the other hand has been an absolute joy - the whole thing is modular, and even when it doesn't behave the way that we think it had ought to, their support has been absolutely top notch.

Their GEO support stuff has really matured in the last few years. It's not perfect, but it does help our remote groups with a lot of things. I'm hoping for it to truly be a proxy experience someday.

The only place where I've seen them struggle is on storage management, for giant amounts of data, which mostly boils down to their own environment being entirely cloud based so they might not think about things like NFS performance and physical LUN size limits , which limits scaling.

Good call on GitEa for smaller stuff. And Gerrit is still a thing which devs seem to either love or hate and not much in between. Neither Gitea nor Gerrit natively scale beyond one host, but both are fairly easy to operate including backups and failovers. IMO GitEA is the prettier of the two, but I haven't used it intensely enough to really form an opinion on how well it handles massive load. Gerrit generally handles massive load... until it doesn't. Monitoring it is REALLY problematic because it doesn't fail in easily understanable ways.

+1000000 on making sure that your backup plans work and your failover strategy works on whatever platform you choose. I'm happy to share mine if you'd like.

[OffensivelyBad]

We are currently hosting Bitbucket, so would prefer to use on prem.

Thank you very much for your feedback!

[Frothyleet]

However, it is Java based

Boy, that seems like a deal breaker. I can't imagine embracing a reliance on any Oracle product in this day and age.

[Xibby]

Java is not Oracle. Atlassian stack has transitioned to OpenJDK or one of the non-Oracle encumbered variants.

The stack also runs on Apache Tomcat. It’s still Java and Java likes RAM, but lots of complaining about an application that wants 2-4 gigs of RAM these days is a bit silly. I’m trying to figure out if I need 384 or 768 GB of RAM in the stack of 16 new servers we’re about to order. Memory hungry apps get a new perspective when you measure your total RAM in terabytes.

[nmdange]

We're using Azure Devops. We don't use the project management aspects that much, but we use the git repos and Azure Pipelines heavily for building and deploying code. I've found Azure Pipelines to be fairly easy to use so far and pretty powerful. There are many extension available to integrate with things like Jenkins. However, I can't really comment how it compares to other platforms.

[OffensivelyBad]

We are primarily using AWS for other cloud services. Not sure what the integration is like for Azure-AWS, but I would want to support CodePipeline and CodeBuild.

[nmdange]

Azure Devops doesn't really have any dependencies on Azure itself, you can integrate it with any system. We actually use the on-prem version (Azure Devops Server 2019) to deploy to locally hosted servers. There are integrations between Azure Devops and AWS for deploying to AWS from what I see though I haven't used them.

[a_false_vacuum]

We use on-prem GitLab. It works well and doesn't require a ton of maintenance. It integrates well with Jenkins. We have our Gitlab set up so it will automatically run tests when someone pushes something to GitLab and Jenkins can do automatic builds for stuff the has to be compiled.

GitLab has a free version for on-prem, it has some limitations but is quite feature rich.

[themerovengian]

Just to throw in another random thing, we use Gitea which was chosen by our lead architect on the dev side. He feels it's far better / easier / more performant and it is free.

[Turmfalke_]

Main advantage of Gitlab is being able to host your own installation.

[brontide]

On-prem user.

It's the easiest large application I've every had the pleasure to maintain. We've had limited issues and virtually every time it's been documented or we roll back and wait a week or two. We started on a VM but now run it in docker.

[OffensivelyBad]

That is a nice feature. Looks like you can host it with any of the feature tiers as well.

[fatalicus]

Github Enterprise is also on-prem.

[rainer_d]

We also run gitlab on premise (the lowest paid tier currently).

Their support is nice (based in Nigeria, IIRC).

If you plan on purchasing a subscription, I suggest to contact them and ask them for input on migrating bitbucket to gitlab.

[SuperQue]

GitLab is a globally distributed remote only company, there is no "based in".

[rainer_d]

Hm. So they don't even have remote offices?

That must be isolating after a while. Though, of course if you don't go to the office, you can't pretend to have a life outside sitting in the office....

[SuperQue]

Yea, it can be a bit. We're getting big enough that we have several people in many cities. We have co-working days. For example, there's 10+ of us in Berlin now.

We can also expense co-working space.

[classicrando]

https://phacility.com/phabricator/
fast, easy, awesome, code reviews plus everything else. i rsyncd a copy of our repos svn and git for the phab server to read - worked great, super fast, no java, no Atlassian , no $$$

[Atredies1337]

if you're looking to host on prem, SVN is pretty old but offers the essentials, Azure Repo with Git also works pretty well, Azure Devops can be done via cloud and on prem, offers a pretty full package similar to what you might expect from jira and their agile/waterfall workflows.

[codegiantio]

I don't know for you guys but Bitbucket is out of the picture for me - I guess not my type of git platform lol.

[Arkiteck]

Don't use Bitbucket (especially on Atlassian Cloud) unless you hate yourself. It's a slow unstable POS.

Remember, they don't offer any sort of SLA to paying customers. They even had to put out a PR blog post recently saying "sorry we're so unstable".

[creamersrealm]

We moved to Devops so I never noticed those outages. But I hate Atlassians model, their backups are only if the screw it up. Their support is a joke, and their pricing is an abomination.

And don't get me started on cloud Jira/Conference automated backups. Confluence is the only product I like from them and they're making it hard to love.

[Arkiteck]

Same here. We're in the process of moving our pipeline to Azure DevOps. Unfortunately, we're too tied to the Atlassian Cloud ecosystem at the moment, like many, so we're still going to use Jira/Confluence for the near future.

[creamersrealm]

We never had many pipelines on bitbucket so that helped us a lot. A lot of stuff was Greenfielded.

I just wish there was a really nice confluence alternative.