Trialing Bitbucket


This page is heavily out of date due to both Github and Bitbucket changing their pricing structure. It still offers free private and public repositories as of June 2017. I now use Gitlab for private repo’s.

So I have decided to trial Bitbucket [bitbucket.org] for my private source code repositories as it provides upto 5 users with unlimited public and private repos. For now at least I will be leaving my public repo’s on github [github.com]

There are some great bitbucket features which github lacks at the moment (Or in my opinion it lacks). These include (And people please correct me if I am wrong here - they may be well buried options on github)

  • The ability to CNAME a DNS record to your bitbucket repo
  • Project options seem better tied in to a business environment
    • No public forks an option for teams
    • Username Aliases (Covering for instance my preferred and works email)
    • Up to 5 users for free in teams

Yes Github’s frontend is superior to that of Bitbucket - especially some of the fancy graph and results tools. And yes the community ethos is larger on github (As an awful lot of people use it) but at present I am trialling github for public stuff and bitbucket for corporate/private - I am not abandoning github - that would be foolish.

Github’s $12 a month for a small plan (10 private repos) is really good value - but I would rather pay per user than per repo. I have a lot of repos and not many collaborators) The “team” option Bronze package at $25 per month is slightly less valuable to me (Other than it gives my “company” and my “personal” account identities without having to sign in/out of Github all the time) but I figured on Bitbucket as it’s free (Up to 5 users) it’s a good value option to have - especially as my client base grows (I hope…)

The other thing I prefer about github is the service hooks are a lot more complete on github too. For instance I use redmine.org (Although I am looking at the forked chilliproject too) for my sourcecode issue tracking but I like the ability to have “reserved” areas for my clients where I can share docs, comments roadmaps etc without them necessarily needing a github account (Git is beyond most of my clients). Yes I could use a third party services for this such as basecamp [basecamp.com] or an Atlassian stack [atlassian.com] - but Redmine gives me everything I want for free. Altassian is really good value up to 10 users - but sadly $1200 is beyond my budget for software (Per piece - 2 or 3 pieces are required for a redmine like experience) And basecamp is cost per project - again I would rather a per user charge due to my more limited user numbers over project numbers.

So the above is a (slightly confusing I admit) look at why I am trialling Bitbucket. The Pro’s of github for public stuff (In my opinion) outweigh that of bitbucket - BUT the more corporate orientated private nature of bitbucket suits where I am now for private stuff (And saves me having to host and secure a gitweb installation) I will let you know how I get on :-) Comments welcome, as always.

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