On the other hand, I wish bitbucket were more popular compared to github. It doesn't seem like they invest much into bitbucket, as some silly issues have persisted for years. Have they given up?
New features are good, but so is fixing existing ones.
Many of the problems I had were trying to get readme.rst to work on bitbucket, readthedocs, and pypi. You all use different syntax to markup syntax highlighting! Even though you all use python! To my knowledge that hasn't been fixed, but not entirely sure because I gave up on it years ago.
Asking around on IRC, it just seems like bitbucket doesn't bring Atlassian a lot of money. It seems that they just see it as marketing for their other offerings, so accordingly bitbucket does not get a lot development.
I wish they improved their Mercurial support. I believe they have only one guy handling all of the Mercurial issues.
That makes sense. I'd guess the main reason people use Bitbucket over Github is "free private repos," with "we already use other Atlassian products" a close second.
The only reason I looked outside of GitHub was Bitbucket's free private repos.
Now, for our academic lab, we're working entirely with Bitbucket (for the UI), and repositoryhosting (for low-cost repo archival with many users).
In an academic setting, where private repos are created for each small collaborative project, then left idle but accessible, GitHub's per-private-repo pricing model is prohibitive.
