Item: Bitbucket
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Bitbucket

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I've used Bitbucket both as a Freelancer and as a Software Engineer at the company I used to work at. We used Git at that company and Bitbucket allows for unlimited number private repositories for a smaller fee than GitHub. Bitbucket was mainly used by the engineering team although it has plenty of integrations that allow for Product owners and managers keep track of what the team was doing.

Pros and Cons

Pros

When it comes to private repos, it is a lot cheaper than GitHub since it allows for an unlimited number.
It supports code review, pull requests, branch comparison and commit history.
It has a companion app called Sourcetree that is very easy to use if you're a CLI buff.
It integrates with tools like JIRA, which help in project management.

Cons

Apparently not so stable as GitHub, but that is rarely a problem.
The only way to search is to launch repository and find it locally or use external apps.

Return on Investment

As a freelancer, the possibility of having my own private repositories is a plus, since I wouldn't want to distribute some client's code and information.

Alternatives Considered

GitHub, Beanstalk and Gitlab

I selected Bitbucket due to the reasons I've listed before. It is free for individuals and small teams of up to five people. It allows for unlimited private and public repos. It integrates with JIRA automatically. It also has a nifty tool for existing repository importing which I find useful and allows for pull requests and code review as some of it's competitors. BitBucket can also be run on your own servers via BitBucket Server.

Other Software Used

GitHub, JIRA Software, WordPress

Likelihood to Recommend

If you're part of a small team with 5 or less users, I'd say Bitbucket is the tool to use, since it allows for unlimited repos, be them public and/or private. Bitbucket started out as a Mercurial VCS, so if your team works with Mercurial you can't go wrong with it. If your team has projects in SVN though, you can't go with Bitbucket as it doesn't support it. If your team already uses JIRA, that could also weigh in as a pro to using Bitbucket as it integrates with it natively off the bat.

Comments

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Bitbucket is a great and reliable versioning tool, especially if you're looking for free git repos hosting