Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash) from Atlassian was a self-hosted source code management solution. The product is no longer available for sale, and support for existing licenses ended in 2024.
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Sourcetree
Score 7.5 out of 10
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Sourcetree, by Atlassian, is a free version control client for Mac and Windows that works with Git and Mercurial repositories. It's distributed version control allows developers to visualize code, review changesets, stash, cherry-pick between branches or commit with a single click.
I actually recommend GitHub Desktop for any developer who uses git. It's far more friendly, has good functionality but not overwhelming, and you don't need to use it for GitHub repos. Sourcetree is only good for if you're wanting to perform complex actions or audit historical …
Bitbucket Server would be good to use if you are not extremely reliant on the availability of your code at any given moment. If you have other systems relying on the up status of Bitbucket Server that can cause problems if unable to reach it -- you might consider going with a different product
Sourcetree is a great tool for any Git user. Whether you're well versed using Git commands in the terminal or a newbie, this tool wonderfully supplements your workflow. A quick glance at the UI and you know where your project stands. I find it most helpful when I need to determine what changed in a particular file in past commits. Having a visual graph of branches helps me to understand the big picture. Even though I'm comfortable operating Git most often in the command line, I always have Sourcetree open to check my work and see where my colleagues are.
There's lots of information about the repo, commits, authors, branches etc. For example you can explore the metadata of a single commit such as when it happened, it's ID, it's parent ID, the author, and any labels.
You can explore the history of the repo as a branch graph - This can be helpful to see what branches were live and what other work was going on at that time. You can explore each branch, commits etc. And the visualisation makes it easier to understand how 'busy' a repo was at a certain time period and see how branches were merged.
There's lots of functions and features which can make complex git actions more streamlined and GUI based. This is great for anyone looking to perform complex git actions or really dive into 'under the hood' management of repos. The merge conflict actions in particular can be helpful.
Adding tooltips when hovering UI elements would make Sourcetree even more intuitive for beginners
During installation, Sourcetree suggests creating or signing into Bitbucket account. This step can be skipped and is not a requirement but it's not intuitive whether these accounts are required to use Sourcetree.
The usability of its interface is pretty straight forward when it comes to creating projects and repositories, but when you have to dive into finer grained portions of the UI things can get tricky. If you are used to using tools like GitHub or Gitlab -- Bitbucket is just different enough to be a bother.
Sourcetree has lots of information about the repo, it's history, metadata, and has lots of features, tools and actions. However absolutely none of this is helpful to the average developer and actually slows down the developer lifecycle and can be overwhelming. In my opinion, Sourcetree should only be used by those wanting to do complex git tasks or auditing. For everyone else, this tool will slow you down and make things needlessly complex.
Never really needed any support as the application is very easy to set up and maintain. Any questions we had were well documented in their online documentation, and community forum.
Stash was selected before I was at the company, but we're looking at these alternatives and actively considering switching. Stash seems to have all the necessary features we need to make it work, but it doesn't have any bells and whistles or extra special features that we can use to create more advanced integrations with other products like Jenkins or Amazon Web Services.
I tried GitHub Desktop for a couple of days, but it is just not visual enough for me. It has no graph display for branches. Too much clicking is required to get info that the Sourcetree UI shows by default. Sourcetree gives you that "Big Picture" dashboard. GitHub Desktop seems unfinished to me due to its lack of this overview screen.
Stash has certainly improved the productivity of the team. We no longer have to use Shared Drive on network which is prone to hacks and errors to manage our code.
During the process of releases, the release engineering team can pull the latest and approved code from Stash and need not be dependent upon the availability of the developers during their non availability. It improves productivity and fastens the ETA for requests.
We have stayed on course for project deadlines since introduction of Stash and helps us achieve the goals of timely completion of projects.
