Living on the Edge - Using Bitbucket As Your Primary Version Control System
Updated October 09, 2019

Living on the Edge - Using Bitbucket As Your Primary Version Control System

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash)

Currently, Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash) is being used as the primary version control system in my organization. This means it is being used pretty standardly across both operations and development teams. This also means it is allowing multiple teams to collaborate on code as any version control system would within an organization.
  • Bitbucket is, as far as things go, good at being a version control system. In look and feel, it's very much like GitHub with regard to structure and browsing code.
  • Bitbucket Server has quite a few integrations out of the box that make it pretty quick and not very painful to integrate other systems (Jenkins for example).
  • When restoring from backup, Bitbucket Server does not re-enable plugins that were once enabled. This means anytime you rebuild you are left to either go with enabling all of them or disabling all of them and waiting for other downstream systems to break.
  • Permissions on repositories and projects are not very straight forward. From a user interface perspective, it's a little unclear the first time how to lock down things like pushing to master for some but not others, how to all others to merge pull requests (thus pushing to master) as long as it's not their own change, etc.
  • Reliability is a real problem with Bitbucket Server. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, it will just decide to stop working and require a full restart of the application (which takes a fair bit of time). Being the primary version control system, this means there are quite a few people unable to complete their work while these issues are resolved.
If you are selecting a product to use and you are not currently using version control, it may be in your best interest to choose another tool. Bitbucket Server is not as feature rich and doesn't feel as mature as some other platforms and arguably, with the lost production from it's reliability issues, there isn't much money to be saved from using Bitbucket over something like Gitlab or GitHub. The user interface of the other tools is much easier to interact with and from a user management perspective it is much easier to get fine grained controls on projects/repositories. Additionally, the other tools have an easier time with integration of CI/CD solutions (GitHub Actions and Gitlab pipelines). Bamboo doesn't feel as useful and user friendly as the other two options.
I am not the primary administrator of bitbucket so I have never used Atlassian support. As such, I cannot provide an accurate rating.
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.

Using Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash)

Developer
Operations
Engineering
3 - Miracle workers! (kidding)
System Administration Skills a must!
Familiarity with how a VCS system should run
  • Version control system (it's our primary system)
  • Integrations with application build pipelines (mostly Jenkins)
Because we're so locked in, it's likely we'll be using Bitbucket Server for a while, unfortunately.

Using Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash)

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.