Bitbucket Vs. GitHub: Who Holds Your Company’s Future?
Introduction
Software creation is a massive business. Some of the most successful companies today are built upon binary code. Modern virtual platforms and products consist of hundreds of thousands (to millions) of lines of code, thousands of man-hours, and millions of dollars’ worth of protected IP. This code is the lifeblood of any technology company, and the next step in their evolution. All of this incredibly valuable code sits in what is known in the development space as a Code Repository. These platforms manage all existing and new additions to the software code.
While there are many code repositories available, the market is heavily skewed towards two products: GitHub and Bitbucket. If you work for a medium to enterprise-sized organization, there’s a good chance you are using one of these two platforms.
GitHub vs Bitbucket
At this moment, what repository does your team use for version control? If the answer isn’t Bitbucket, you might want to consider switching. The two largest hosting services for source code and development projects hold roughly 52% (GitHub) and 11% (Bitbucket) of the market. Both offer features essential for modern development teams, including Pull Requests, third-party integrations, inline editing, and issue tracking.
While GitHub is widely known with over 20 million users compared to Bitbucket’s 6 million, there are some downsides. GitHub’s public repositories are free, contributing to its popularity in the open-source community. However, millions of dollars of code can sit there with no contractual protection. In the case of a hack or website outage, recouping losses is difficult. For enterprise teams, Bitbucket offers several advantages.
Why Bitbucket May Be a Better Choice
- Branch Permissions: Control who can write or merge to specific branches, ensuring only the right team members make changes.
- Views and Insights: Different views help you understand what changes were made and where.
- Continuous Integration & Delivery: Built into Bitbucket, reducing the need to manually manage repositories and servers.
- Private Repositories: Bitbucket offers free unlimited private repositories for up to five users, whereas GitHub requires payment for private repositories.
- Version Control Options: Bitbucket supports both Git and Mercurial.
- Semantic Search: Smarter search that crawls syntax to find matching definitions, not just variable names.
- Third-Party Integrations: Direct integration with Bamboo, Jira, Crucible, Jenkins, and external authentication with GitHub, Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
- Git Large File Storage (LFS): Shorter clone and fetch times for teams working with large files.
While GitHub may have a larger community due to its open-source popularity, Bitbucket is more enterprise-friendly with unlimited private repositories and the only hosting option for Mercurial users. If you’re looking to implement Atlassian platforms and enhance your Agile capabilities, Clovity can assist you throughout the journey.
📧 Contact us at sales@clovity.com or visit 🌐 atlassian.clovity.com to get started today.
