Compared to the other tools we evaluated, Upsource was the only tool that allowed distinct reviews without needing explicit pull requests while still being able to go in-depth when required. The diff viewer is serviceable and better than the alternatives, as well, especially …
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.
Upsource is the best review tool we've found but it still has some flaws. Notably, it makes reviewing small and quick changes less convenient than they need to be, and diff viewing (especially collaboratively) can be tedious.
It does handle larger, iterative reviews well. Especially when using a feature branch, Upsource will track that branch and automatically add all commits to the review. You can then review the branch as a whole, or look at a subset of diffs.
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.
Creating and closing reviews isn't as quick as it could be. You must create a review, assign reviewers, approve and close. I wish there would be a quick review-approve-close for a commit where the change is simple and doesn't require multiple review iterations.
Web based interface can be clunky, especially when looking at big diffs side-by-side
JetBrains IDE integration is somehow less convenient than going using it in browser.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Compared to the other tools we evaluated, Upsource was the only tool that allowed distinct reviews without needing explicit pull requests while still being able to go in-depth when required. The diff viewer is serviceable and better than the alternatives, as well, especially the side-by-side viewer.
