Atlassian Bitbucket vs. GitHub vs. GitLab

As a team we need to push code into the repo on daily basis, Bitbucket has proven that is a reliable and secure server to save and get the code available in no time. The administration part is really easy and there's an extra tool for every developer profile either if you want to use the console or a GUI like Sourcetree.

Incentivized

GitHub is well suited for software development, GitHub is particularly well suited for software development projects, where teams need to collaborate on code, track changes, and review code changes. Also for open-source projects, GitHub is an ideal platform for open-source projects, where teams of developers from all over the world can collaborate on code and contribute to projects. For documentation, GitHub provides a platform for creating and sharing documentation, making it an ideal solution for teams that need to create and maintain documentation. On small and medium-sized teams GitHub is well suited as those teams that need to collaborate on software projects and track changes to their code.

GitLab is good if you work a lot with code and do complex repository actions. It gives you a very good overview of what were the states of your branches and the files in them at different stages in time. It's also way easier and more efficient to write pipelines for CI\CD. It's easier to read and it's easier to write them. It takes fewer clicks to achieve the same things with GitLab than it does for competitor products.

Incentivized

• Very easy to integrate with other DevOps tools like Jenkins and with project/workflow management tools like JIRA.
• Very efficient in managing security and compliance standards for code, especially during pull requests, merge requests, branching, etc.
• Very robust in performance, especially the cloud and datacenter versions hardly hit any performance issues and supports more than 2000+ developers in my company.

Incentivized

• As a repository it's great. It houses almost all the open-source applications/code that anyone can fork and play with. A huge collection of sample codes available with problem statements across different domains make Github a one-stop location.
• I use GitHub with Windows and the Git Bash is superb. It [is] a powerful alternative to the Command Prompt and Powershell. Allows me to run shell scripts and UNIX commands inside the terminal [on] a Windows PC.
• GitHub integration with almost all cloud development/deployment platforms is amazing. Deploying a new application in Azure is really smooth. Just link the GitHub repositories and it's good to go. From automatic build to deployment everything is just amazing.

• GitLab excels in managing code versions, allowing easy tracking of changes, branch management, and merging contributions.
• It helps maintain code stability and reliability, saving time and effort in the development or research workflow.
• Powerful code review features, enabling collaboration and feedback among team members.
• Robust project management features, including issue tracking, kanban boards, and milestones.

Incentivized

• The code management UI is a bit rough around the edges and difficult to work with.
• BitBucket does not have the same simplified PR management tools as other competitors.
• It's not as easy to integrate 3rd party apps as other competitors.

Incentivized

• When browsing history of a file, GitHub could make it easier to see the file after a particular commit instead of just being able to quickly view the commit. I'd like to be able to see the commit or the file itself in one click.
• I would like to be able to view commits by user.
• I would love to be able to traverse code on GitHub (go to definition, etc) - the good news here is that they are working on these features!

Incentivized

• CI variables management is sometimes hard to use, for example, with File type variables. The scope of each variable is also hard to guess.
• Access Token: there are too many types (Personal, Project, global..), and it is hard to identify the scope and where it comes from once created.
• Runners: auto-scaled runners are for the moment hard to put in place, and monitoring is not easy.

Incentivized

All products have room for improvement. The system improves over time with better and better integrations and I look forward to even more features without paying extra! The system has increased transparency across my organization and with this transparency comes increased throughput on projects. I don't think I can go back to any other system and we are definitely married to this product.

Incentivized

GitHub's ease of use and continued investment into the Developer Experience have made it the de facto tool for our engineers to manage software changes. With new features that continue to come out, we have been able to consolidate several other SaaS solutions and reduce the number of tools required for each engineer to perform their job responsibilities.

Gitlab is the best in its segment. They have a free version, they have open-source software, they provide a good service with their SaaS product, they are a fully-remote company since the beginning (which means they are fully distributed and have forward-thinking IMO). I would certainly recommend them to everyone.

Incentivized

The architecture of Bitbucket makes it more easily scalable than other source code management repositories. Also, administration and maintaining the instance is very easy. It integrates with JIRA and other CI/CD applications which makes it more useful to reduce the efforts. It supports multiple plugins and those bring a lot of extra functionality. It increases the overall efficiency and usefulness of Bitbucket.

Incentivized

- Easy to use compared to other version control software. UI interface makes it easy to use, as well as protects against making a major mistake by deleting code, etc. - UI looks modern. - Support for multiple platforms, which I assume will only get better with time. - Student benefits are awesome! - The size limitations on their repositories make sense to me. Not too crazy but realistic from a business perspective.

Incentivized

I find it easy to use, I haven't had to do the integration work, so that's why it is a 9/10, cause I can't speak to how easy that part was or the initial set up, but day to day use is great!

Incentivized

The customer support provided by Atlassian (Bitbucket's parent company that also makes Jira, Confluence, etc.) is very helpful. They seem to be very concerned about any issues reported with their products and even just questions about functionality. They are constantly improving the products with new features in nearly every release. Plus they have a plethora of online documentation to reference.

Incentivized

It's a testament to how easy it is to use GitHub and how many others use it that you can pretty much find the answer to any problem you have by searching online. Consequently, I've never needed to use their support. It's an incredibly easy tool to set up initially, so it won't require much onboarding expertise to get started.

Incentivized

At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft

Incentivized

For the features we were looking at, Bitbucket, GitHub and GitLab were all at par and were in a similar price range. We found that GitHub was the most full featured should we need to scale very quickly. GitLab was at par with GitHub for our future needs, but GitHub was a more familiar tool compared to GitLab. Bitbucket won out because of its close integration with Jira and being in the Atlassian family. It was also cheaper than GitHub. As we started with Jira, Bitbucket addition became a natural next step for us. We really liked Bitbucket and stayed with it but we do know we have great options in the form of GitHub and GitLab should we need to scale fast.

Incentivized

At the time to evaluation - Bitbucket was very tightly integrated into Atlassian’s suite of tools. For an organization that is starting out and looking to spend limited funds effectively - the cost/benefit of using that suite of tools usually doesn’t make sense. Granted things may have changed since then (its been over 5 years) - but at the time GitHub was effective - and all prospective engineers knew about it and already had accounts. This made it very easy to add to the organization and not lose time in training, etc. Developers seem to really love GitHub above most other tools out there - so that plays into the decision making as well.

Incentivized

Gitlab seems more cutting-edge than GitHub; however, its AI tools are not yet as mature as those of CoPilot. It feels like the next-generation product, so as we selected a tool for our startup, we decided to invest in the disruptor in the space. While there are fewer out-of-the-box templates for Gitlab, we have never discovered a lack of feature parity.

Incentivized

• It's allowed for a lot of automation in terms of development workflows. It lets us pursue CI/CD approaches and get releases out faster
• It has let us get our infrastructure configuration into VCS, which further improves our automation abilities.
• It has aided in keeping track of changes, and allows us to keep workflows organized so we can track the status of development

Incentivized

• Github has increased our rate of code development, increasing our publishing rate. This helps bring attention to the research we are doing and ultimately brings in more funding for further research.
• Because GitHub makes my team more efficient, we are able to put more hours into code development / report writing rather than agonizing over different versions of code created without version control software.
• We use a paid version of GitHub, because we work through private repositories, but the increase in productivity, efficiency, and research progress is definitely worth the price.

Incentivized

• GitLab cut down our spent on container, package and infrastructure registry
• Best thing is we can now have everything in single platform which cost effective too
• Quality of support is really good and they do have emergency support team as well which is great

Incentivized