For a while I was a bit worried that GitHub had just ran away with the prize and no one else was bothering. It is pretty obvious that Google isn't interested in improving Google Code and that Sourceforge hasn't aged a day (that's not really fair, but it feels like it).
I think there is still a chance for BitBucket to make a splash, but I think its going to be hard to win anymore. That's fine, 2nd place makes a lot of money too (not counting places 1-10 for enterprise source control, which basically print money, and of which GitHub is chasing too).
I like Bitbucket because they support both Mercurial and Git. They also acquired SourceTree (probably the best version control app on the Mac), employed the main developer and made the app free.
Can you elaborate on why? I've found it to be far from intuitive and basically a direct mapping of CLI commands straight into UI elements. A user unfamiliar with command line git arguments would have a difficult time with SourceTree, I would imagine (most of my coworkers have).
A user unfamiliar with command line git arguments would have a difficult time with SourceTree
Let's be honest about git: A user unfamiliar with the CLI commands will have a difficult time, period. I hesitate to predict that it's impossible to create a good UX, but git is a very complicated system with an abstraction that leaks all the way down to database records. Breathe on it wrong and the repository will wedge into a state that sends longime veterans off to stackoverflow.
Yes, git is worth it... but so far every clever GUI has basically been a convenience tool for power users, not a better abstraction that can sidestep the learning curve. It's hard to see how this is going to change without some sort of fundamental change in git.
I recently started keeping some source code in a gist, which github was eager to point out is a full repository. The UI is not very usable, but it's not hard to understand for the non git enlightened like myself. If nothing else, this proves that it's possible to create an easy to use git GUI. (with reduced functionality)
The github GUI for Mac/Windows solves this problem completely, by hiding the vast majority of git's power-user features. (No stage, no no tracking branches, no manual rebasing.)
Even with fairly boring usage, the Github GUI periodically wedges my repository into a state which requires CLI interaction (and a trip to stackoverflow). It's even worse for newbies - I get desperate pleas for help from clients all the time. I have come to the conclusion that there is no way around teaching the command line first, then giving them the Github client after they achieve competence.
Can I repro giving the Github client to newbies and getting desperate pleas for help soon afterwards? Yes, it's consistent :-)
No, I have not tried to reproduce the incidents which screwed up my repository. After a few harrowing experiences I pretty much gave up using the Github for Mac client for anything except basic commits. And even that screws up - I frequently have to commit files twice; it's like the client only stages some of the files, even though they're all checked. If my commits are large I usually go to the command line to avoid the double commit msgs. I'm about to give up entirely.
basically a direct mapping of CLI commands straight into UI elements
That may be some of the reason that I like it. I am able to do a lot of the things that I could do from the command line, but with a visual interface to help me visualize what's going on.
For example, when I'm doing a commit, I can click on each file that's been modified and see the diff for that file right on the side. I can then stage all or just parts of the changes. So if I have some debug lines, I can stage the file and then unstage the debug logging so it doesn't get committed.
There's just a lot of little things like that that you CAN do with the git command line yourself, but it wraps up in a way that's easier to consume.
I'd have to take more time than I have now to write up a full review of what I like about it compared to other GUIs.
I haven't seen it mentioned here but Tower for Mac OS has been a great tool for those who are not too familiar with git or it's associated commands. I've recommended it to at least a few hundred clients many of which use it religiously today.
One more datapoint: can't say I like SourceTree. Still looking for a Mercurial GUI worth using. My biggest issue is that I'm a big user of annotate/blame (I have a very bad memory so finding out where/how/why a given piece of code was created or evolved is something I do at least weekly if not daily) and all the hg guis have absolute shit annotate. They also tend to look rather bad.
GitX is pretty good (I think I still prefer the original one over the Laullon gitx, but the Laullon gitx has an acceptable annotate view and look nice), and surprisingly the best annotate view I've seen so far is in bazaar's qt-based UI. The tools are not necessarily great overall (and the OSX interactions are downright weird), but the annotate is excellent.
With the $100M investment I now think it's probably a bad business decision for github not to get a bit more aggressive on pricing for those edge cases where bitbucket clearly wins.
it's probably a bad business decision for github not to get a bit more aggressive on pricing for [free private repositories]...
Yes. If Github offered just one free private repo, then I would move to them in a heartbeat.
Github is still Github, after all. ("Second resume" etc.) Unfortunately current circumstances prevent me from open-sourcing a certain small segment of my codebase, and... well... Bitbucket is free, and I'm living on Ramen while trying not to worry about my dwindling savings account. So it's a pretty clear-cut choice for me.
I would prefer if they would tie their pricing to the size of a repository or the number of collaborators, but not the number of repos. I have a paid account that I would like to dump a lot of old projects that I hardly ever change. I would have to upgrade to "large" and even that one wouldn't fit all the projects. Right now the solution is to either not host it with them or use something like Bitbucket.
definitely. hobbyists tend to run to "lots of small repos with low activity on any given one", but the net resource usage is the same as or lower than "a few big repos". per-repo pricing is more a "pay not to be inconvenienced" than "pay for your use of our resources" thing.
Instead of creating a repo per project, I create a orphan branch within a shared repo for that project. The benefit of this approach is that you can always cleanly export the commits into its own repository without altering SHA ids. The con is that you have to pick separate branch names for each project (e.g. proj1-master, proj2-master).
Yes. Especially when you factor in that github does a startlingly bad job of many basic things. Their ticketing system blows, for example -- you can't prioritize anything. Yet they have time to implement a CLI in the search bar...
I moved my personal private repos to BitBucket a long time ago, and haven't looked back.
that's an example of why I stick with Bitbucket and don't bother to switch to Github with my projects although it's so hyped. Bitbucket works great, gets the job done, their commit log beats up the gihub one, and they don't focus on implementing useless bells and whistles.
Well, when you've got a large list of things stored on a computer, and you want them displayed in a certain order, automatic sorting (after you assign a priority) is a lot more useful than having to rearrange them manually.
I thought assigning priority labels is manual anyway?
I mean, if you want to build a natural language parser that counts how many times the words "URGENT" and "HELP" appears in the issue and then automatically reorders it, you can do that with the Github issues API anyways, right? I don't know of existing bug trackers that make priority automatic.
You can filter based on labels in github issues, if that's what you meant.
Even better: if you sign up with a .edu email address (hell, even my university email account works and it's a .es), they upgrade your account to unlimited everything, automatically.
GitHub also does a Educational plan, but it requires manual requests and IIRC they give you a Micro account. So Bitbucket is the default choice for all my shared class projects.
Thank you! My Swedish university address worked as well. Just created also an unlimited team account for my research group. This is exactly what I have been wishing Github would do for a couple of years now.
BitBucket has already been in business for a long time, it appears GitHub is not a fan of free private repos. In the early stages that was probably a help because your site looks more active if everyone using it is public, but these days the lack of free private repos is pretty surprising.
Yes exactly. I've noticed a lot of open-source Python projects use Mercurial on BB - there is still some community segmentation. I would think as people get tired of Google Code remaining static and backwards compared to BB that more Mercurial projects will move to BB from Google. The BB UI was pretty weak compared to Github before today. I'm glad to see this.
I use BB for the free private Git repos but had always planned to switch to paid Github once I actually need collaborators. Now I could see staying with BB when I need to go paid.
I think so, too. I started off with Mercurial (and still prefer it, if I'm working on solo projects) before moving to Git, and by then Bitbucket had already won me over :).
It's a different way to price products - they charge per user. So, if your little startup starts growing, they bring in a bit of cash and have opportunities to up-sell with the other products in their line.
If my startup grew past 5 team members, I would personally just move my private repos to GitHub and start paying them. Bitbucket provides a great free service, but I'd probably never pay for it.
You just might reconsider (and that is what bb is banking on), at the end of the day having to police the number of repos you can have is a pain(esp in a startup, where people are seemingly forever going off to hack away on random stuff). Sure bb isnt as pretty--current redraw notwithstanding--but unlimited repos is very handy indeed. just saying. Inline commenting was missed (we moved from gh to bb a few months ago), but i see that has been released too.
I was drawn in by Mercurial, went to GitHub when I switched to Git (the only thing that was holding me back, frankly) but left my private repositories on BitBucket, still in Mercurial. I shall be converting them to git and committing to sticking with BitBucket for all of my private repositories now!
there is no catch. their business model is not on repo count, but collaborators count. in other words, solo devs and very small teams can freeride, if you grow bigger you start paying.
BitBucket is run by Atlassian, their goal is to later upsell you to their line of products, so they loss lead with free unlimited private repos in the hope that if you need a project management/bugtracker system you might choose JIRA.
The crown jewels should always be kept under lock and key!
A couple of years ago I was at one of the Github drink meetups. I asked if they were working on encrypted private repos (this was just before or around the time Github Firewall was introduced). A Github employee told me no… before adding that in his opinion source code was not valuable.
I asked him to clarify and he said imagine if Twitter had their source code leaked. It wouldn't be a big issue as Twitters success was built more on business execution rather than code. A valid point perhaps but small indie developers could easily be put out of business if the source code to their unique selling point or competitive advantage were to be made public.
I'm sure Github (and others) take security seriously, but given the above, caveat emptor!
Hosted repos can only be so secure. If you need absolute trust, host them on your own machines (for which GitHub and Atlassian will happily sell you tools to make doing so easier).
I think there's a lot of truth in this attitude, I sometimes think 'if someone can take our code without all our knowledge and do something useful with it better than we can, then they deserve to win', having said that, I also strongly suggest that it would be bad for GitHubs business for it to be widely known that they have this attitude...
They've got a good shot, because a lot of people need private repositories and do NOT need the social features of Github. They just need a basic git server to hold the master repository. For doing their work, the built-in tools of git are sufficient.
For such people, Github is ridiculously expensive, since their price is based on the number of repositories you have. For instance, at work we've got enough repositories (all small) that we'd need the $200/month Github plan. In terms of storage costs, that works out to about $10/megabyte/month.
That's 5 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more than the market rate for cloud storage. When you are selling something 5 orders of magnitude above the market rate, there is room for competitors.
Isn't that like complaining about Apple selling the iPhone at over $100/ounce?
I don't contest that there are probably people who only need a remote git repo and nothing else. But those companies that would service them either compete on features or get pushed down to wholesale cloud storage prices, a place you don't want to be unless you're Amazon.
Thats maybe a day of single developer's work - less if you actually pay your startup dev's market value.
Paying for a service that can double or triple a developer's productivity - people say the UI on BB is still not as great, so that counts for something - must at some point justify that developer's time.
If you have enough repos that you'd need to spend $200 a month on a platform that offers:
- Wikis
- Basic Issue Tracking
- Source Control (and damn good source control at that)
- Integration with many popular startup tools
Then maybe your startup should be out of business. I could shit $200 dollars and pay for my companies hosting.
Trying to skimp on this is like telling your 10+ dev team to use google talk for offline coordination. Yes, you save money on chat, but you lose all that time I waste copy-pasting and coordinating chats between multiple devs.
Perhaps you misread the OP, but he mentioned megabyte not gigabyte. S3 costs $.125 per GB for the first TB, so the math would be: (.125/1024)(10101010*10) which comes out to $12.21, or pretty darn close.
Bitbucket's self-hosted enterprise product Stash is priced aggressively. It's free for open source projects, non-profits and classrooms. For small teams (up to 10 users), it costs just $10/year, all in, and you get the source code.
Contrast with Github where the minimum purchase is 1 seat pack (up to 20 users), costing $5000/year, and you don't get any access to the the source code.
I am really curious: Why does getting access to the source code matter?
(I am just asking since it seems to be a selling point, and I have never really modified the code of a tool that I have used. For example, how many people modify Eclipse, or Maven, or BugZilla's source code?)
Stash's internals are completely extensible. Having access to the source allows you to extend and modify it to fit your needs. On top of that, you can build features (i.e., plugins) on top of Stash that you can share or sell to other Stash users on Atlassian's Marketplace.
I think it's targeted to startups who want to do costs savings. As they'll probably retain them when they grow, the pricing goes 180 times more expensive for the next plan. It's still a lot cheaper than Github, though.
We recently moved to GitHub Enterprise and it really is not as expensive as it looks. It is $250/year per developer... not really that much considering what you get. Plus it is a virtual server provided for us, so we just have to upload software upgrade packages to get the latest updates. We didn't have to spend the money on someone to set up all of the MySql, Redis, Solr, etc. services to get it running. So honestly I consider GitHub Enterprise to be quite a cost savings. Just a counterpoint...
EDIT: We are not a startup, but still something to consider.
Not yet it isn't. In the current UI, to get to the source code, you have to
1. Find the little "Source" link and click it.
2. Find the "Browse" link, which is in a little toolbar right under the other little toolbar, next to the (less relevant) "Changes" and "Clones" links, which look visually near-identical.
3. In most (but not all) projects, hunt down the word "trunk" in tiny 13px text, and click it to see the main development branch.
Compare to GitHub or BitBucket, which just show you the damn code.
(Yes, I know you were joking, but I've been wanting to rant about this UI failure for a while now. And don't even get me started on Launchpad.)
> but I've been wanting to rant about this UI failure for a while now. And don't even get me started on Launchpad.
After five years or whatever of being tricked into clicking Launchpad links, I just noticed the other day that they have a "source" link on the top left corner. I had no idea they actually displayed source code. I always thought it was some crappy bug reporting product. Who knew?
> I always thought it was some crappy bug reporting product.
Hah. Got you, it's also a crappy project-hosting product, a crappy code-hosting product, a crappy code review product and a crappy FQA/Q&A product. And an acceptable translation product (not as good as Transifex, but it's free, bit it requires using the rest of that crap).
I've always liked the bug-tracker. It's much more user-friendly than bugzilla IMO, and it handles bugs that affect multiple projects really well, even when the other projects use other bug trackers.
> and it handles bugs that affect multiple projects really well
Kind-of, changing the project set (outside of adding projects to an existing bug) might be impossible (same with in-project "series" — its code for branches), until fairly recently the role of some statuses was very unclear (and I'm still not entirely sure of their actual use), one of the links is essentially useless and — as everywhere else in launchpad — text formatting is completely non-existent (without even talking about richer data sets, such as adding screenshots to bug reports which falls under "add attachment or patch").
Multi-project and multi-branch tracking are nice, but they're limited and they don't make the tracker much friendlier.
Since BitBucket is run by Atlassian, whose primary business (as far as I know) is enterprise software, I would guess (again without knowing) that they're in a pretty good position.
They're well known for their wiki, Confluence, and their ticket/issue/task tracker, JIRA. Source control is a natural extension of those tools, which I'd guess have had some effort put into making sure they work well together.
Looks like Stash is what they sell to enterprises, versus BitBucket which is hosted. Anyone know if these are completely separate products, or if they share a common codebase?
I've found SourceTree to be a great GUI tool for working on Git/Mercurial repos.
All of which is to say, good on them. I'm glad to see two very respectable players in this space.
> Looks like Stash is what they sell to enterprises, versus BitBucket which is hosted. Anyone know if these are completely separate products, or if they share a common codebase?
Those free private repos are awesome and liberating - instead of bundling whole solutions into repos I'm just making them for anything now because the difference between a dozen repos and a few dozen is $0 a year instead of $600.
I really wish Google Code would support paid/private projects. Every startup I have been at would have been more productive with Google Code. Their bug tracker is better than both GitHub and BitBucket. We wouldn't have needed yet another set of accounts due to already being on Google. And critically they let you have multiple repositories for the same project. That is a huge annoyance with GitHub and BitBucket where you have exactly one repository (sometimes a second "wiki" one) and then one bug tracker, downloads etc. Every project I have worked on has multiple repositories (eg a server part, testing code, android client, admin tools, ios client). It has been of zero benefit having each one with its own bug tracker, downloads, wiki etc as often issues cross boundaries (eg bad display in client could be because of a bug in server returning bad data).
* Unlimited private repos for pay customers (price is per user)
Github's pricing with a limit in the repo number makes it pretty much impossible to use if you're in the service business and you start a new project quite often. It may be fine for the startup with one main project, I guess.
"but I think its going to be hard to win anymore" I guess history has showed us that as soon as something feels unbeatable, a contender comes out of nowhere to dethrone the king.
Please keep on doing what you are doing. Your service and this new redesign is awesome, and my team and myself wouldn't be where we are without you.
We're a small team of young developers working on a startup for the past few months. We haven't launched yet so we're obviously not profitable, but the fact that you've enabled us to make it as far as we have also ensures that when we are in a position to pay for software development tools they will come from a brand we know, trust, and love: Atlassian.
Also, you should update the Atlassian Store with t-shirts and other swag.
Once again, great job, thank you, and keep on keepin' on.
I know its not the elephant in the managed source code hosting space, but I like BitBucket better then Github. I like the option to use Mercerial for projects and I like the way they ask me to pay for things ( pay for private shared repositories ).
Also, BitBucket's free plan allows for unlimited public and private repositories, while GitHub only allows for public repositories on the free version.
I use BitBucket for a number of side-projects mostly as a way to make sure all my code is backed up off-site, for free.
Then again, Github and Bitbucket routinely have the same issue as far as my experiences go (I mostly use Bitbucket, but routinely interact with github due to the project on there)
We switched over from Beanstalk to Github a few months ago.
Beanstalk's web interface had fewer features and, more worryingly, it just failed to display changesets quite often (was also down for maintenance relatively frequently).
Has anyone ever tried to implement a 'crowd-correct' feature where a reader could do something like correct "then->than", and if enough users made the same correction (a couple high-rep users, or more low-rep users) it would stick.
I supposed the biggest challenge would be user abuse -- changing even just one word can completely change the meaning of a comment, and yet the comment would still be attributed to the OP. You would need, at least, a flag to indicate the post had been 'crowd-corrected', and perhaps a way for the OP to revert & lock their comment.
Another thought is use Google's auto-complete API, if you pass it the string "better then Github" it returns "better than Guthub". I find simply running a Google search on a phrase is often the best way to auto-correct it.
That's very similar to the editing mechanism in Stack Exchange sites; a low-rep user (or even an anonymous user) can suggest an edit which then must be approved by two high-rep users or by the original poster. Or any high-rep user can just edit it directly, although that would be a less attractive feature on a site like Hacker News.
This sounds like a really great idea, I think the simplest way that would avoid abuse is if fixes were sent to the user so they could change it, but instead of needing to edit the comment manually (copy change -> remove old -> paste) they can view a diff and either "accept" or "reject". It wouldn't be perfect but it would be better than people needing to reply (like I did).
This works well for non-realtime stuff (e.g. this is how OKCupid does crowdsourced profile edits), but in this instance dkhenry may not see these suggestions for some time (and, in your proposed solution, have an item sitting in the edit queue for approval), while hundreds of people are getting distracted by his typo in the meantime.
You have to be very careful, though, because there may be legal (and definitely social) ramifications for changing a user's submitted content without consent. I know it absolutely enrages me when Flickr auto-lowercases an all caps comment I try to post. ("lazer cat!@!" doesn't have quite the same oomph as "LAZER CAT!@!")
The solution knocking around my head for this was a "sub-channel" for off-topic corrections to posts, so you can suggest a spelling or grammar alteration without a) cluttering the discussion or b) looking like a <nasty word> for calling them out.
The solution knocking around my head for this
was a "sub-channel" for off-topic corrections
to posts
That seems like a great idea
b) looking like a <nasty word> for calling them out.
judging by the downvotes I guess people think I was trying to be a dick... then vs. than is a very common English error, I figured he'd rather know than continue to be wrong. I would have emailed if he had an email in his profile, but nope. oh well.
Regarding the second half, I find that problematic. Sometimes it's very clear to me that English is not someone's first language, and you can often tell what is by the mistakes they are making (for example, "I have been working here since 3 years" is a common mistake by native German speakers, as it's a direct translation of the equivalent phrase in German). In that situation I find many people are appreciative of stylistic notes, but it's hard to pull off without looking like a grammar [fascist].
For me the experience of managing open source repositories gets worse with recent bitbucket updates to the point that I'm in process of moving my open-source to github.
How one is supposed to find what have bitbucketer done? Visit e.g. Ian Bicking's account: https://bitbucket.org/ianb . Is it easy to find out why are so many people following Ian? What repositories are interesting? "bbdocs" with 4 followers? From the first page of Ian's repositories I know "dozer", did Ian wrote it? Click. Oh, it's an outdated fork.
Just compare the direction Github took at its recent redesign. GitHub folks made user profiles act like resume. The repositories are visually big, it is clear what repositories are popular, what repos are active, etc. It is also clear what a person is into: repositories are sorted by 'last modified' date. There is "Explore" section with trending repos (bitbucket's Explore is a joke) and so on.
Bitbucket instead removed follower counts and fork counts from the repositories list; repositories are sorted alphabetically now; there is no way to see who the user follows or who user is followed by.
I was missing important ticket updates at bitbucket several times because the newsfeed is not "infinite"; "Inbox" messages count stops working sometimes, etc.
There are things bitbucket is better at: e.g. github links to source code lines are awful (they don't contain changeset information in URL by default and so easily become outdated); there is no way to specify repo language in github (one of my recent Python repos was in a "Top followed this week" for a C language, that's great of course but..)
Don't get me wrong, bitbucket becomes nicer and nicer, I'm still a heavy bitbucket user and we use a paid account at work; but it seems that the open source support (code discovery and presentation) is not their priority right now, or at least they act so.
I think one of the reasons for github's success is that it put a lot of emphasis on the "social" part of the website. At some point using github was "cool" and I think there's been a massive network effect. It's sourceforge meets facebook.
I sometimes wonder if github's not headed to become the new reddit. At least if you look at some of the comment threads on the site it looks that way [1].
Bitbucket feels more like an old school "code hosting" service. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
>I sometimes wonder if github's not headed to become the new reddit. At least if you look at some of the comment threads on the site it looks that way [1].
You mean the new old reddit, I presume? Where reddit was a tech-dominant site rather than a news aggregator / spam site?
As someone who mostly uses github to browse through source code, the experience in Github is much better. Their source browser is fast and the code is very readable. Now, I'm trying to see if the new bitbucket can compare but there is no Explore option on the homepage so I can't really check their source browser.
Well, Github's UI used to be much better, now it's comparable. I do wonder why Bitbucket insists on having "overview" as the standard page to go to when visiting a repository, making Code the default would be a better idea IMHO. Also because more people use Github, more people are likely to start using it so they can fork their favorite projects
1) not all users are coders. For instance Sourceforge assumes that people will be most interested in downloading a binary. Not a bad assumption for its time, and still its primary usage. Github often the top google link for a project, and would be intimidating for somebody who just wants to download and use a Windows app.
2) If I'm interested in something, I take a look at the README, code, issues & wiki. So code as one of many rather than front and center is not necessarily correct. But once I've started using something, I've already got the code and am much more interested in everything else.
There is something to be said for sane defaults. That being said, if the target audience is not developers, then perhaps this is a sane default. I think Bitbucket is pretty good; however, I personally prefer Github as it caters to my tastes much more.
Maybe it is just the installations I have had to use in the past (Possibly installed on slow computers or requiring too many custom fields etc) but as an issue reporter I loath JIRA as a slow and clunky issue tracker which also makes finding issues annoying.
Maybe it has wonderful features for the developer side but I haven't used that part of it so I cannot comment.
Whenever I go to report a bug on a project and find out they have JIRA I shudder.
I'll tell you why: the 'git' in 'github' which helped to create all the hype around it. I came across lots of developers that thought github was somehow related to Linus, and for them and everyone else it was almost intuitive that github was the way to go if you wanted to use git.
The design is very clean and appealing. I'm glad to see they're still investing significant effort. I want to see Bitbucket get more visibility and success.
I prefer Mercurial. Among other things, it has better cross platform support. Bitbucket added Git a while ago. I wish Github would add Mercurial.
Bitbucket also offers unlimited private repos. That means I only use Github for OSS projects. I use Bitbucket for everthing else. Consequently, I always recommend them to friends and companies looking for hosted repos.
Have you tried hg-git? I've been using it as my sole way of interacting (well, other than the web interface) with GitHub and I haven't run into any showstoppers.
I also use hg-git almost exclusively. My main issue with it is that pushing and pulling takes considerably more time, from 20-30 seconds for plain linear commits up to many minutes if there are merges involved. It's not a showstopper for me (especially considering the alternative of working with git direcrly) but I can see it being more problematic for people that tend to push on every commit.
My workaround is to also keep a local git mirror (git clone --mirror) and push through it:
Note that the installation instructions on that site are completely out of date. You don't need a C compiler anymore, just clone the repo and enable the extension, as described in the README: https://bitbucket.org/durin42/hg-git
I love their website and how you can create free private repos. Good business practice: Unlimited private projects, limited contributers on private projects. Win-win
BitBucket is offering free private accounts as a loss leader, not out of the kindness of their hearts. This is their strategy for competing with GitHub.
A $7/month subscription for private github repos is well worth it.
GitHub's loss leader is providing ad-free hosting for millions lines of open source software. That's not only a good business decision, but one that benefits everyone. I happily pay $12/month for GitHub because nearly all the open-source projects I develop with are on there and I don't want to bother operating two accounts.
7$ a month for 5 private repos is not worth it all. I acknowledge that Github is a business but I am not about to pay a lot of money for hosting all my repositories, when I can do the same on Bitbucket for free. And when the team grows enough that I'd have to pay Bitbucket, I'll do so willingly.
If you consider $7 (or $12) a month a lot of money for software then you're probably not in the target audience for any (SaaS) software product. A lot of people are willing to pay some money for a SaaS product even when there are free alternatives.
I can't think of any piece of software I use regularly that doesn't cross the "worth at least $7 bucks" boundary.
If you have each client take on the $ burden, then you don't have this problem. You've may have convinced yourself that by absorbing the cost, you are doing your client a great service.
In fact, you are putting more burden on yourself for little value. It takes 15 minutes to walk the client through how to pay for and manage a github organization. I do it with all of my clients. It is an opportunity to teach/coach and give them a sense of ownership which is how it should be.
You make a good point in that this could be absorbed as an implicit cost of a client project - but tell me again, why would we do this, when we can simply use BitBucket and create as many repositories as we like, without any problems whatsoever?
Our only limit is then the amount of people we hire, which is far more reasonable in my eyes.
If we were working on a small number of projects, then it would absolutely not be a problem to work with Github - it's when you have a lot of tiny projects that it becomes prohibitively expensive to work with.
Fair enough, that's how Github wants to price their service - I guess its catered more to actual startups (who have a few large core projects) rather than businesses like ours.
I think Github's plans are comparable to Bitbucket - it's just the starting tier is a bit more pricey - and, honestly, $7 or $12/mo doesn't make that much difference.
Over 20, and rapidly increasing - we create a repo for each new project. (consultancy)
Sure these projects are not too big, and the team isn't too big either, but if hosted with Github, we'd be looking at soaring costs per month, or join repos together.
You're certainly able to pay for BitBucket, it's just that they don't require you to pay until you reach a team of 6 people. You can pay $10 a month to BitBucket and be able to have a team of 10 if you'd like, even if it's just yourself.
Could you elaborate on "integration with almost every open source project" ? I don't get it.
For me github (and git) is like iPhone, a place for the "cool kids", and bitbucket for the rest of us :)
Mostly because some github/git/iPhone/Mac enthusiasts are rather loud and fanboy-like - this destroys git experience for me. I prefer calm mercurial/linux enviroment :)
Exactly, this was the point we were trying to make. In our case, we're a small team (<5), and have a lot of such projects - making our monthly cost closer to 30 to 50 a month. Compared to Bitbucket's cost of $0 for our case, it's definitely a no-brainer.
Both comments are a bit silly. Atlassian (BitBucket's creator) is one of the more successful revenue "startups" while GitHub has hardly acted like a business to date.
I think it is really unfair to call Github greedy - they provide a valuable service and charge, in my opinion, a very reasonable price for it.
I'm actually considering moving to bitbucket - I have a lot of small private repos, and free vs $22/month makes a lot of sense. It's not that $22 is a "lot" of money - when you just have a bunch of small stuff on the side and don't make a ton of money off it, $22 here and $10 there starts to add up.
But I don't think Github is greedy - I'm just not their target market, and that's fine.
Yay! Github's UI has been slowly getting worse over the last year, and their paid account options are terrible (limits on the number of private repositories, as opposed to the disk space). I've been a paying company for years and years, but I recently scaled back from four paying accounts to one.
I don't want to have to organize my private git repositories around GitHub's idiotic account restrictions, so I'm going to give BitBucket a try with some personal repos and see if the UI works for me. If it does, you've got a new customer. :D
I generally version all the things, and end up with lots of small private repos. Bitbucket's pricing model is perfect for hosting that kind of thing. Really liking the new UI.
I often init new repos even if its a single file script. Github pricing is per private repository, but Bitbucket has free unlimited private repositories so I can just push them all up.
Awesome, I think this just heavily strengthened the future of Mercurial. I'm not trying to start any version control wars here, but personally, I found Mercurial to be the most "intuitive" approach (unlike Git/SVN, but again, that's my opinion).
I've extensively used Bitbucket in the past, especially for personal projects. I love what I see here, and will continue to use the service as such. Long live Bitbucket! :)
Lovely work. From peeping the source, looks like an interesting hybrid use of Backbone.js as well. If you're interested in getting the new Bitbucket listed on the Backbone homepage, just email me a brief paragraph, and I can set it up.
The new design is really great and in many ways better than GitHub’s. Now people unfamiliar with the services might actually be able to find a download button for once.
Another place where GitHub is really dropping the ball is in the social aspect of their service with terrible activity feeds I can’t believe anyone actually uses. I wrote a rant about it here: http://pygm.us/uGhNdcGU.
There are many, many ways Bitbucket can beat—and beats—GitHub, so this new design makes me a lot more optimistic about the continuing competition between the two and the improvements this will result in on both sides.
I will say that I’m not sure whether I like a grey as dark as the one you use in your new design, though. :)
Oh, well, that's very close to white. 96% white as a matter of fact, after checking in gimp. It needs to be at least a few percent to be noticeable as different by they eye.
Perhaps you should up the brightness on your monitor?
A lot of people here are commenting on GitHub being 'overpriced' or 'greedy.' TPW did an interview a while ago that has insight into why their pricing structure is the way it is. It's a pretty interesting read:
(search for 'which metrics') to skip to the pricing part).
Money quote: "That’s like buying a car based on how much it weighs. It’s irrelevant."
I may be biased since GitHub does a lot to foster the developer community in my area (I nabbed a sweet contracting gig at one of their drinkups), but I'm perfectly happy with their pricing.
> Money quote: "That’s like buying a car based on how much it weighs. It’s irrelevant."
Car manufacturers are constantly going on about how the latest model weighs X% less than last years. Lower weight usually means better handling and a more fun driving experience...
It looks like the limits are by number of users, which seems fairer. But they will probably make less money. I thought most of the projects on github were <5 people.
It depends. I can see a lot of scope for small companies starting on Bitbucket to take advantage of the low costs, and then buying the larger plans as they expand.
...they didn't change/redesign anything on the commit view. The commit page on Bitbucket has always always looked that for as long as I can remember (been using it for a year or two now).
Also, I recall having the ability to diff. files before the new upgrade as well, although not side-by-side as they mention in the linked article.
We've had side-by-side diffing for about a year. What the redesign has (apparently) done, is bring forth those features, as we're seeing more and more people discover them today.
A few months ago, I convinced my startup to try bitbucket because of the free private repos. Over the course of a month or two, there were multiple times that I could not collaborate with my teammate because bitbucket was unreachable. We have since switched to github, pay a small fee per month, and have never had this issue.
How is everyone else's up-time experiences in the past few months? I'm setting up a few personal projects and would like to give them another shot if they've improved that one aspect.
BitBucket is a vital part of Atlassian's internal development process, all product teams use it on a daily basis and we treat it as a mission critical service, I'm really surprised by this comment as here in Sydney we rarely see any issues, I would be lying if some hiccups hadn't happened in the past but they were usually in very short duration, and usually only affect the UI so you can still pull/push using HTTP/SSH, moreover we have a 24/7 dedicated team to respond to any outages and there is absolutely no differences in terms of infra-structure of free vs. paid accounts inside Bitbucket, so rest assured that we put a lot of effort on making the site better for everyone.
We would love to hear more feedbacks like this through our usual support channels when it happens so we can investigate and improve our service.
(Disclosure: I work on Atlassian's OnDemand team).
Surprised to not see GitLab mentioned here. GitLab is FOSS and already has almost all of these features, allowing me to host multiple private repos on a single cheap VPS. That is exactly why I chose it over Bitbucket or Github.
If Bitbucket wants to stay competitive, I think this is the least they can do -- unfortunately I don't see any innovation that puts them ahead of the other players in the market.
This is awesome. I've been wanted to host my own code (right now I'm con CodebaseHQ [1], great service) for security purposes but I didn't want to go with a plain git+gitosis.
I have it up and running now on my nginx (it was already serving all my projects), it took about 30m to do everything on Ubuntu following their how to and looking up their issues queue for a couple quirks I found.
Exactly my point -- these 'new' Bitbucket features are a blatant clone of Github as well. I was expecting more from all the fanfare.
For instance, users are clamoring to be able to link external issue trackers of their choice (which can be done simply by URL). I think the first host to supply that feature will have a step up.
> these 'new' Bitbucket features are a blatant clone of Github as well
I think you misplaced the word "some". Inline pull-request comments are ripped off gh, but I've never seen arbitrary commit diffs there, it certainly isn't in the UI. The branch selector yes, the overview not at all. The UI organization has also, if anything, moved further away from Github's.
Arbitrary commit diffs have been in Github since March 2010 [1]. The Overview is exactly like what Redmine and GitLab call 'Activity' [2]. Github has Activity in a different manner, through notifications and the News Feed. These are useful features, but they are not innovative.
Actually, the design is The Atlassian Design Guidelines and it uses the Atlassian User Interface project (Atlassians Bootstrap) which all Atlassian products are using to maintain a consistent look and feel https://developer.atlassian.com/design/
Are you sure you're looking at the redesign? It looks less like GitHub now. There are still similarities, but Bitbucket is thankfully starting to take on its own style.
And to my mind, that's just fine. Github gets a lot of stuff right, so making it similar makes sense. The differences are significant enough that you couldn't mistake one for the other.
It's hilarious how difficult it is to get a non-programmer on Windows setup on Bitbucket (to clone a repo and then push a commit).
I don't blame this on Bitbucket, I blame the state of Windows Git applications.
My friend who is an artist (pretty technical too but he's not a programmer and never deals with SSH) is going to do some art for me for a game project I have in Bitbucket. I added him to my repo and told him to download Gitextensions, which seems to be, arguably, the best free graphical git app for Windows.
So, he downloaded it and set it up but when he started it up for the first time there was no option to clone from a source URL other than from Github.
First you have to figure out that you need to setup your SSH key and then clone the SSH url. I know that, but a non-programmer with no experience using git before would probably have zero clue.
You have to then setup your SSH key using Putty, and I'm sure we all know how awesome it is that SSH keys generated with Putty are in a different format than SSH keys generated with ssh-keygen, so pasting your public key into the Bitbucket site leads to nothing but problems. You have to erase some stuff, add "ssh-rsa" to the front, remove the newlines, etc. You can't just copy and paste the whole thing. If you aren't experienced with SSH keys you will not be able to figure it out. The bitbucket docs for this step assume you have an SSH key generated from ssh-keygen and not from putty, so they are of no help.
Once you get your ssh key straightened out then it's not too bad.
In short, it sucks. If Bitbucket wants to capture people other than programmers they need a better Windows app. For this reason alone I would be tempted to use Github instead since they have a dedicated Windows app.
Gitextensions is open source too so they it doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to just add support for Bitbucket just like they have for Github.
I've used SmartGit for Windows too but I'm not a fan of their products and I was looking for something free.
Does anyone have suggestions for getting non-programmers setup on Windows?
I'm pretty sure you can use GitHub's Windows app for BitBucket Git repositories. I've pointed it to non-GitHub repositories at work in the past. You should look into it for your friend.
Looks great and the home page is very aesthetically pleasing, but it appears to lack any links to actual, in-use repositories.
If you look at Github's home page, the top half of the page is full of links to organisation pages and popular repositories (jQuery, rails, etc.) and there's a prominent "Explore GitHub" link with trending repos, etc.
BitBucket's home page looks like it's demoing a program they want to sell: loads of examples of how it looks and who uses it, but no links to an actual, well used repository. I had to Google for an example repository to examine since I much prefer to actually play with it rather than be told how it works.
Just canceled my GitHub private subscription. I only recently found out a few weeks ago that Bitbucket offers git access; the last time I used them, it was Hg-only. Really happy to be using Atlassian products again, and I love the new redesign. Awesome stuff!
Many of us, use github profile pages as resumes. Your redesign focus has been towards "repository landing pages" rather than user "user landing pages".
I like the new look in general, but one drawback is pretty clear. The readme is now narrow and can't expand. I like narrow columns in general, but now all of my <pre> text is much too wide and showing scrollbars. Lots of work ahead. :(
I also see there is no whitespace around my h3s and not much around h1s, and h2s. Looks quite cramped. Still nicer on the whole. I guess I can try to hack in some line breaks manually.
It was very well said by gwf: This is a race to the bottom in terms of sustainable pricing. I love the free plan but who knows how it'll play long term.
It's not a race to the bottom, bitbucket's not free, they just have a different pricing scheme.
I'm a happy paying customer with 10 users and dozens of repositories. We're an agency, work on a lot of different projects, and having price be O(people) instead of O(projects) makes lot more sense for us.
As amazing as it may sound on HN, GitHub isn't best for everyone. Therefore, there are ways to compete with them that aren't price-based.
This is an amazing redesign. I love Bitbucket for its support for Hg and Git, and it has free private repos. Always loved using it, now I have more and more reason to use it every day. I might move back to it for my open-source stuff, and just push stuff to github as a side thing. Or setup a hook on Bitbucket to just push for me.
Another great thing about bitbucket is that the basic code which handles the mercurial integration has been published as a Django application (on bitbucket of course). This has allowed us to create our own specialised code hosting platform. ( http://mbed.org/code/ )
I'm loving all the various changes, but one thing I miss is the line in the footer that used to proudly proclaim the version/build of the various pieces of software (e.g., Django, piston, some oauth thing) that bitbucket runs on. Don't see it as a comment in the source either - was that moved somewhere else?
Looks great. I've been using Bitbucket for a while and I've always hoped they redesigned their website. Now with the pull requests and all, it looks more usable. Although I find GitHub more beautiful and usable, I'd definitely recommend Bitbucket too.
Atlassian's business model is to draw in small companies with their $10 plan, and increase prices fast as the company grows. They're just following the same pricing model with Bitbucket. Free private repos for up to 5 users, paid accounts after that.
This is great. I continue to use bitbucket for all of my personal repos since they provide unlimited private repos for free. I would use github for my private repos but I have lot's of small repos that make private github cost prohibitive.
I never manage to figure out where is Bazaar and Launchpad in all this game...
every time I try to think of a more "friendly" git, it's Bzr that pops into my mind, not Hg, but... where does one "put it on the map" in the DVCS and related services world?
This interface looks great. I suggest that the landing page have several ways to get to prominent open source projects hosted on Bitbucket so people can easily see the live interface before signing up.
I've always disliked bitbucket, because the interface always seemed obtuse. This looks incredibly appealing! Well done, and I shall certainly be giving it a try (current, paying github user)
The old layout always makes me think that they don't give a damn to BitBucket. Seems that I was wrong. BitBucket is awesome and the new layout reflects this awesomeness
The thing that always bothered me about bitbucket (and sourceforge) is that the main page of any source code project should be the source code, not some overview page.
This. I am a young student from Germany and at least in my environment almost nobody owns a credit card. Why should we when you can pay everywhere with your debit card (without fees!). AWS, I'm looking at you :/
Same here. :) I asked GitHub about this via mail because I couldn't believe that they are only accepting credit cards... Sad but true. I would even send them money one year in advance to get my private repository but now I am using bitbucket for a couple of months now - even for customer projects.
"Relating to Bitbucket security, we take your source code security very seriously. Nearly all of the code on Bitbucket, is private. Via the web application, no Bitbucket staff members have access to your repositories, nor can they grant themselves access to your repositories even for support reasons.
At the datacenter, VPN access limited to a very small number of engineers on our team, and we store the repositories in a hashed directory structure that makes it difficult to identify repositories by username."
Choosing Bitbucket wasn't tough. I needed a private repo for the little sth (hobbyist) I was doing. Bitbucket gave it for free and there wasn't anything I missed from Github.
Oh, I forgot - I had started that in Mercurial, (/beginner/experiment/learning), though switched to Git later, and that was another huge reason.
I still have open repos on GitHub. I will either keep them mirrored at Bitbucket or might move altogether. Brining balance to the force is good :-)
I think there is still a chance for BitBucket to make a splash, but I think its going to be hard to win anymore. That's fine, 2nd place makes a lot of money too (not counting places 1-10 for enterprise source control, which basically print money, and of which GitHub is chasing too).