Bitbucket & GitHub

If you work in the software industry chances are that you have heard of Bitbucket and GitHub. If you haven’t heard of either you may not know the reason for their usage: they are repositories, which means they are places where you store your code. The benefit of repositories is code storage, version updates handling, source code backup and easy collaboration with other developers. Bitbucket and GitHub both provide the same basic services but let’s look closer and see the differences between Bitbucket and GitHub.

GitHub Overview & Pricing

GitHub is very popular amongst many software companies; it has received significant venture capital funding to add to its popularity. GitHub supports only git at this current time.The pricing for GitHub can be a pain point for many overseas or independent developers. Its free plan does allow for unlimited repositories, but it doesn’t enable you to make those repositories private. In the free plan, you do have an unlimited number of collaborators which is great when you are working on a team. If you pay $7 a month, you allowed to make five repositories private, and you still have unlimited collaborators.

Bitbucket Overview & Pricing

Bitbucket has a free account as well, and it has a cap at five users, which still allows for a small development team to have collaborators. Bitbucket supports git and also supports mercurial. Bitbucket’s free plan allows you to have private repositories. If you are a small company or independent developer, maybe Bitbucket is the way to go as far as free accounts.

Security

GitHub made some headlines a few years ago when they had a major hack back in 2012-2013. Bitbucket is not flawless by any means, but they do keep their users updated with their blog and if there are any immediate concerns they do give a shout out and let you know if they were affected or not. When it comes to storing anything online, there is always a risk, so when it comes to GitHub or Bitbucket, you can’t go wrong with either.

User Interface & Users Base

GitHub has a lot of features: issues reporting, issue tracking, and resolving, pull request and an online wiki. The layout is smooth and easy for users to navigate to any section they may need. Many users like the design and the extensive features list make it a favorite amongst many users. GitHub also has a user base of upwards to 12.4 million users.

Bitbucket was behind GitHub when it came to features in years past but they are slowly playing catch up and now have many of the same features as GitHub. One feature, however, that Bitbucket possesses that GitHub doesn’t is JIRA integration. JIRA is a way to track and manage work request and is used by many agile development teams. Having that JIRA plugin is a big plus for Bitbucket, and for many companies it can make up for some the lag in features. Bitbucket at the beginning of 2015 had roughly 2.5 million users, and it seems to be steadily rising.

Which to choose?

Here at Seamgen, we use Bitbucket since it has the JIRA plugin. If you are a smaller company, and you are trying to reduce overhead cost, maybe Bitbucket is right for you. If you don’t mind the public repositories and have many collaborators, then GitHub works as well. Bitbucket and GitHub are both great and depending on a few factors one may just work better for some development teams. Do you have a question or want to know more? Contact Seamgen!