GitHub vs. Bitbucket: It's More Than Just Features

One of my main projects was split into a lot of sub-project repos which made is easier to manage and version those sub projects independently.

For private projects, GitHub charges by the number of repos and BitBucket charges by the number of users. Initially I was using BitBucket but after having used GitHub I eventually opted to pay more on GitHub. There are two major factors for this. First the UI for GitHub is extremely polished. It's a hands-down winner. BitBucket has always felt aged and clunky in looks and operation.

The second reason is the tie in to open source which makes it very easy to fork open source projects on GH, and then include them in your projects. Again, the network and activity graphs, the commit log, diff/blame/pull-request features etc, just make this whole aspect a lot more fun to use.

I suspect the only reason BitBucket is surviving is because of their differentiated pricing model. If GitHub offered a hybrid pricing (repo or user based), it would mark a sharp decline for BitBucket even though as a consumer I prefer if they were more competitive.

It's worth noting the differences here for students too - bottom line is that despite all the awesome deals Github have procured for students [0] Bitbucket completely dominate here.

Github offer a free micro account - 5 private repos, unlimited collaborators. Even without a student offer Bitbucket offer unlimited private repos with 5 collaborators for everyone, which is already awesome for students. They'll bump it up to unlimited collaborators for students though, which is a seriously generous deal.

It's not as slick but it's a no brainer for anything that can't be public, which there's a lot of in university.

[0] https://education.github.com/pack

Gitlab [0] has unlimited private repositories and unlimited collaborators. It might prove to be a good alternative.

[0] https://gitlab.com

I choose BitBucket purely because of the unlimited private repos. I get all the opensource collaborations free data fork me, and it's all cool, but when I play around with my own projects, I'd rather keep it private until it's ready for "real" use.

Also, I use Git to manage large projects written in LaTeX. So far the limit of 5 collaborators haven't been an issue.

One main reason I am considering BitBucket is that their issue tracking is more elaborate. There are issue priorities and components, which are essential for large projects. These could be shoe-horned into Gitlab using tags, but it requires third-party plugins.

We use stash and GitHub where I work, and we constantly complain about Stash. GitHub is just so much nicer to use in different ways. If your team does lots of PRs and collaboration you will probably prefer GitHub too.

Mercurail support is main Bitbucket feature for me. If mercurial support will be added to GitHub I will switch to GitHub. But I don't think, that GitHub will support anything except git.

Bitbucket's UI is a bit clunkier than GitHub's, but being able to juggle free private repos and dual wield VCS is certainly good.

Another thing I like about Bitbucket is it far less gamified than GitHub. The latter pretty much has gamification and phony social interaction built into its core, whereas Bitbucket has less bullshit (while still retaining useful things like private messages).

In addition, another more cynical reason to use Bitbucket is as a middle finger to GitHub monoculture. Linus Torvalds once snarked about how Linux being written in C "keeps the idiots out". Using BB is also very effective at keeping the peanut gallery out and having less distraction in general.

I use self-hosted GitLab. It's very similar to GitHub, but our company has full control and ownership over our code.