Bitbucket vs. GitHub (updated for 2023) | UpGuard (2023)

If you boil it down to the most fundamental difference between GitHub and Bitbucket, GitHub focuses on public code and Bitbucket focuses on private code. GitHub has a huge open source community and Bitbucket tends to have mostly enterprise and business users.

Bitbucket vs. Github: Two of the largest source control services for development projects, offering a variety of deployment models from full cloud-based to on-premises. Historically, they have taken different approaches to private and public repositories, affecting the ease of collaboration and the risk of that collaborationdata exposure.

A Github account is the software developer's business card. Just as every author is encouraged to show their blog, every developer is expected to create examples of their code on GitHub. But that doesn't necessarily make GitHub the best choice for software development teams. GitHub thrives on easily sharing code and as such is essential to the open source backbone of the internet as we know it. At the same time, it means organizations need to be more diligent in managing their users and usersaccess controlSettings to ensure they don't compromise theirscyber resilience. The pricing models of the two products also reflect their different approaches to how best to manage version control.

What is Bitbucket?

Bitbucket supports Git, but the situation has changed for other repository types. Bitbucket's advantage over GitHub used to be that both Git and Mercurial repository hosting were available with Bitbucket. There was never support for SVN, but Bitbucket's modernization came at the cost of support for Mercurial. Bitbucket is written in Python and uses the Django web framework.

Founded in Australia in 2008, Bitbucket was originally an independent startup providing hosting only for Mercurial projects. It was acquired by Australian company Atlassian in 2010, and support for git repos was added about a year later.

Many users worried about keeping code private have migrated from GitHub to Bitbucket following Microsoft's recent acquisition of the platform for $7.5 billion.

Note: Mercurial support will be removed from Bitbucket on June 1, 2020. Learn more aboutAtlassian's decision to focus on Git.

What are Bitbucket's features?

Bitbucket integrates very well with JIRA, which was originally developed as a bug tracker but is now flexible enough to be used for: bug tracking, issue tracking, service desks and project management. This is no surprise since JIRA is also an Atlassian product. Other features are:

• Pull-Requests und Code-Reviews
• Unlimited private repos
• Branch comparison and commit history
• Bitbucket Mac and Windows client called SourceTree; Android app called BitBeaker
• Bitbucket for enterprise, called Stash
• Integration with tools like Jira, Crucible, Bamboo, Jenkins, HipChat
• Deep integration with Trello via their Bitbucket Cloud capability, which provides seamless integration of branches, commits, and pull requests into Trello boards.
• Branch Permissions. Rather than giving developers access to every branch in a repo, Bitbucket allows you to restrict access to a single branch. This prevents nightmare situations like an accidental master push and is a key differentiator for Bitbucket.
• Integrated continuous delivery, issue tracking, and wikis.
• Easy integration with Bamboo and Confluence in addition to Atlassian's own Jira Software Cloud for additional setup customization and hosting.
• Bitbucket Snippets allows you to create and manage multi-file snippets of any type.
• Third-party integrations allow you to integrate Bitbucket into multiple facets of your existing workflow, making the entire development process much more efficient.
• Bitbucket supports Git Large File Storage (LFS), which means faster cloning and retrieval times for those working with large files.

What is Bitbucket's pricing?

The pricing structure differs from Git in that Bitbucket charges per user while Git charges per repository. Bitbucket allows unlimited public repositories for everyone, but also unlimited private repositories for free for up to 5 users. Furthermore,The prices are graded according to the tableunder:

Cloud-Edition

Self-hosted editions

Bitbucket Data Center Edition is available for up to 30,000 users for $792,000 per year. If you are interested in extensive prices,Click here.

As the plan name suggests, the server plan is hosted on a company-owned server and requires a one-time payment.

What is GitHub?

First off, GitHub only hosts projects that use the Git version control system (VCS). That's it. nothing else. But Git is by far the most used VCS, so GitHub is still the largest code host of them all, with over 100 million code repositories now.

What are the features of GitHub?

GitHub.com was originally launched in 2008, with the platform written in both Ruby and Erlang. GitHub is designed to promote close communication and collaboration within development teams. To that end, it includes features like highlighted code comments and collaborative code review. Other notablefeaturesAre listed below.

• An integrated issue tracker right in your project
• Milestones and labels within projects
• Industry Comparison Views
• Native applications for Windows and Mac desktops and an Android app
• Support for over 200 programming languages ​​and data formats
• GitHub Pages, a feature for publishing and hosting within GitHub
• Security like the use ofSSL, SSH and/or https for all data transfers andTwo-Factor Authenticationto log in
• APIIntegrationfor easy third-party tool integration and integration with a large number of other tools and platforms. Some examples are Asana and Zendesk for issue/bug tracking; CloudBees, Travis and CodeClimate for continuous integration (CI); AWS, Windows Azure, Google Cloud and Heroku cloud hosting.
• The GitHub folks also acknowledge that SVN is also a widely used alternative to Git, so they provide a tool to import SVN repos into Git and host them on GitHub, although it's reportedly clunky at best.somewhat cumbersome solution. And they've cleverly made sure the GitHub repos are completeaccessible on the SVN client.
• Mark sentence order. However, GitHub users will be used to this as a standard, must-have featureBitbucket in particular continues to lack.
• High usage in open source projects. Given that GitHub has a large number of public repositories, this is hardly surprising. Supporting trending repos and showcasing popular themes has helped make GitHub the de facto choice for the open source community. Big open source projects like Linux, jQuery are hosted on GitHub.

What is GitHub's pricing?

GitHub pricingis free for public repositories and starting January 2019, like Bitbucket, will offer free unlimited private repositories. For private repositories, GitHub allows unlimited collaborators grouped in the following paid plans. The Team plans allow for a central admin who manages teams and can set different permission levels. There are alsoGitHub Enterprise, a version tailored for large organizationsthat offers cloud-based and on-premise deployment options.

Incidentally, in early 2014, GitHub was the scene of a nasty case of employee harassment. A female software engineer named Julie Ann Horvath came to GitHub with revelations about a discriminatory and generally unfriendly environment for women. She also reported being harassed and intimidated by an initially unnamed wife of a GitHub founder, aggravated by the tacit approval and support of the woman's bullying antics by the founder himself. These individuals were later identified as GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner and his wife Theresa unmasked. The resulting negative publicity led to Preston-Werner being initially suspended and then resigned from his role on GitHub's management team and his wife barred from the company's offices. CEO Chris Wanstrath publicly apologized to Horvath for what she went through at the company. GitHub also launched an investigation that dismissed Horvath's allegations of "gender discrimination, harassment, retaliation, or abuse." This story needs mentioning in part becausehostile jobs not only drive away talent, it breeds itCybersicherheitsrisiko– Risk of loss of time, penalties, damage to reputation and disclosure of data. Read more about the whole dirty sagahere,hereandhere.

BitBucket vs GitHub: UX and Ease of Use

The widespread use of GitHub by small developers to host their code has resulted in a well-tested platform that offers one of the best user experiences in the open source community. Bitbucket, which didn't start with such a strong focus on open source and saw lower usage, struggled at times with an interface that was deemed more complex to navigate than what GitHub offers. Recently, however, this has changed. Bitbucket is now getting rave reviews for its user experience. The online editor is among the best to edit code directly online without checking it out on your computer first. While not the easiest of platforms, it's powerful and versatile, with plenty of features to support the needs of small businesses and businesses that have been using the platform extensively for a long time. At the heart of Bitbucket's interface is the "Your Work Dashboard," which gives you easy access to your repositories and pull requests. Bitbucket offers a full Git interface and supports everything from pull request filtering to issue tracking, SSH key management, and other features.

GitHub has a simple interface suitable even for beginners of Git and online source code hosting. The platform has long been open-source friendly and includes a user interface that provides access to Git's underlying functionality and exposes some of its own. However, there are scenarios where you still need to know how to use Git from the command line, especially when managing large open source projects with complex merging requirements.

GitHub makes it easy to view and review collaborator commits with online comparison capabilities, allowing you to manage code at a granular level. The interface also offers excellent support for collaborative code review, which is very useful for working in teams, tracking and managing tasks, and DevOps features like CI/CD. Through its other tools, such as GitHub Desktop, GitHub allows you to further expand the range of features you can use to manage your Git code collaboration.

Bitbucket vs. GitHub: Developer Adoption

Developer adoption and community reach is an area where Bitbucket and GitHub have had different fortunes. In the absence of GitHub's dominant position in open source, Bitbucket continues to play second fiddle to GitHub in terms of user count. However, the community has seen impressive growth in recent years.

Bitbucket now boastsmore than 10 million registeredusers, which, while not enough to displace GitHub, which in turn has also grown, makes Bitbucket one of the leaders in the online Git code hosting marketplace. Since the company's founding in 2008, its commitment to helping companies write code, test software, and collaborate has grown to a level where it can claim that 60 of the Fortune 100 companies Bitbucket every use day. While Bitbucket has a smaller community than GitHub, it also boasts a wealth of integrations, meaning its community has access to tools like Slack, AWS, Datadog, and JFrog just like the developers using GitHub.

GitHub's community is far more impressive, especially when it comes to its reputation in the open source community. To be a credible open source project or developer, it's almost a de facto standard that your code must be hosted on GitHub and publicly available. GitHub's user base now consists ofover 40 million registered users, with over 100 million Git repositories hosted on the platform. GitHub's community is active in 200 countries and contributes significantly to the platform's pre-eminence in the tech world. This sizeable community also drives business value and may have been a factorMicrosoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billionback in 2018. While Microsoft and the open source world hadlong in dispute, the partnership between GitHub and Microsoft gives GitHub newfound credibility with enterprise customers and Microsoft newfound credibility with open source developers and software users. Needless to say, the GitHub community, which already includes a good chunk of Fortune 50 and Fortune 100 companies, could continue to grow by leaps and bounds in the years to come.

GitHub vs. Bitbucket: Wikis and Collaboration

In addition to working with source code, both Bitbucket and GitHub serve as platforms for collaboration and knowledge sharing. Wikis and other collaboration tools built right into the platforms help teams work together on ideas that are part of the intellectual space of code. In Bitbucket, when you create a code repository, you get a wiki. Bitbucket wikis can be edited and versioned, and many projects also use them as project home pages.

Bitbucket offers many other features that make team collaboration easier, including parallel diffs, IDE integrations, and the ability to organize repositories within projects.

GitHub also offers a wealth of collaboration features, with its history of facilitating very large open source projects proving the robustness of collaboration support tools on the platform. Some of the projects with the most influential collaborative networks and the highest number of contributors are, to name a few:

• Node.js
• Rost
• Ansible
• TensorFlow
• Respond natively
• Kubernetes
• Apache Spark
• Visual Studio-Code

The GitHub workflow with easy cloning, repository forking, branching, pull requests, merging, diffs, and more makes this one of the best platforms for teams looking to collaborate on code, open source or not. GitHub also offers support for wikis to document your project and share information with your team. Wikis are available for GitHub Free, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and GitHub Enterprise Server. Wikis can be written in Markdown or other supported formats. Just like source code, wikis are publicly visible for public repos and restricted to team members for private projects.

Integrations with tools commonly used by developers

One of Atlassian's key selling points for Bitbucket is that it integrates well with Atlassian's suite of developer tools, and these tools are widely used and popular with developers. This is certainly true and should be a factor in your consideration, but note that GitHub has taken steps to support its products with similar capabilities and also integrates well with the Atlassian suite of developer tools.

Bitbucket integrates well with Jira, Atlassian's issue tracking software, and Trello, the project management tool popular with many software and business teams. In addition, 50+ integrations with other commonly used developer tools are available to developers and teams hosting their repositories on Bitbucket. These include:

• Amazon Web-Services
• Microsoft Azure
• Docker-Hub
• NPM
• Sonar
• And many more

With integrations, you can view metrics from these services and tools directly in Bitbucket, and manage aspects of your software or DevOps infrastructure right alongside the code.

If you finally decide to use GitHub, you'll be happy to know that the integrations available for both Trello and Jira are very powerful. 2018,GitHub announced that it had worked withJira to create an integration that enables advanced capabilities to connect your GitHub code to Jira Software Cloud. Trello also has a GitHub Power Up integration that allows you to attach GitHub pull requests to Trello cards. Managing your GitHub work in Trello should be a breeze thanks to this integration. However, GitHub has taken steps to enhance its own product with Trello-like features. 2016 for exampleGitHub launched "Projects,” a feature that allows Trello-like cards to manage tasks and code projects.

GitHub also hasIntegrations availablefor a wide range of popular developer tools and software products. For example, a Slack integration is available for team chat, as well as integrations with Codefresh and Semaphore for continuous integration. Available monitoring integrations include LogRocket and Waydev. In the Project Management category, integrations with GitKraken Glo Boards and DeepAffects are available, among many other useful integrations across multiple categories.

Given that both Bitbucket and GitHub are among the giants in the Git repository hosting space, it's likely that they'll continue to offer the widest range of integrations with other popular code tools. A notable exception here is the2020 Discontinuation of Mercurialfrom Bitbucket source code hosting services. GitHub never supported this VCS, but Bitbucket did for many years. However, due to the small number of Mercurial users, it has finally disappeared from Bitbucket's platform and will no longer be supported in the future.

Alternatives to Bitbucket and GitHub

They may be the most visible and reputable Git hosting platforms available to developers today, but the popularity of Bitbucket and GitHub doesn't mean they're the only viable platforms available to you. Some reluctant longtime gamers have always been chugging along in the background and may get more attention as Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub and other changes have led at least a small number of open source developers to ask questions.

Gitlab

Since appearing on the scene in 2011,GitLabhas become a notable competitor to GitHub and Bitbucket. Over the years it has evolved from providing source control to a full DevOps lifecycle product. To quote the company's own website: "From project planning and source control to CI/CD and monitoring, GitLab is a complete DevOps platform delivered as a single application."

LaunchPad

LaunchPadis the software collaboration management platform used by Canonical, the makers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution and related software. Canonical is one of the big names in the open source movement, and their software management platform with support for Git and Bazaar is a great solution if you're working on open source code.

SourceForge

Another notable platform in the open source world,SourceForgeallows open source developers to host their code and distribute their software and downloads through the platform. It also has tools to import GitHub repositories along with associated data like wikis.

Others

There are many other Git source control and collaboration platforms that your team can use to develop software. Some notable ones to look at areGoogle Cloud-QuellrepositorysandAWS-CodeCommit. These tools also integrate well with cloud computing resources offered by their respective providers, Google and Amazon.

Final Thoughts

Bitbucket and GitHub are very closely matched in terms of features and both are sufficient code repository hosting services if you need to use Git and/or need a basic personal account. Both now have unlimited free private repositories. And if your version control system (VCS) is Mercurial, then Bitbucket is the only one for you. Unfortunately, neither supports SVN, which remains popular. Each has some useful features not found in the other such as: B. GitHub pages for small web hosting projects or Bitbucket's JIRA integration.

The choice may depend on the structures of your projects. If you have a lot of personal projects and a small number of users per project, Bitbucket might be a cheaper option due to its per-repo pricing. If you have large teams collaborating on only a few projects, GitHub might be a better option. The free plan offered by Bitbucket and GitHub is aimed at individual developers and small teams.

See howUpGuard can help secure GitHub repositoriesand prevent dangerous data exposure.

Pricing aside, the following summary comparison table may also help you in your decision:

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