
GitHub and BitBucket (2011) - Mitt
http://www.pocoo.org/~blackbird/github-vs-bitbucket/bitbucket.html
======
StevePerkins
By this article's logic, virtually every Linux desktop environment "stole"
from Microsoft for over 10 years, and have spent the past 10 years "stealing"
from Apple instead. Hacker News is stealing from a million different old Perl-
based forum sites. Sure, you kinda sorta have a point... but it would be very
hypocritical for anyone here to care much about that point.

I'm also not sure that I buy the main premise of the article, that GitHub's
and BitBucket's "communities" warrant comparison. Of course they don't.

GitHub's pricing model offers you open collaboration for free, and charges you
for private repos. Thus it is ideal for open source development, and open
community.

BitBucket's pricing model offers you unlimited private repos for free, but
charges you by the number of collaborators. It also integrates well with JIRA,
a very popular task/bug tracking system in small to midsize shops. In sum,
it's not really trying to be an open source "community"... it's trying to
compete for the in-house business of small to midsize shops.

If you're trying to draw collaborators to your open source project, then
BitBucket is a poor host. Likewise, if your company has one or two dozen
developers and a large number of repos, then GitHub makes no sense as a paid
host.

All of my personal projects are on GitHub, and my company is all on BitBucket.
I'm not so much interested in their "innovation vs. creative bankruptcy" as I
am in the choices they've made with structuring their pricing models.

~~~
jedbrown
We use Bitbucket as primary host for open source projects to avoid fragmenting
access control. Proposal repositories need to be private and most coauthors
prefer journal article repositories to be private. GitHub's pricing model
would encourage us to consolidate these private repos, but each has a small
number of different external collaborators, so that would yield undesirable
granularity. Meanwhile, all of our software products are open source, with a
much larger group of contributors than the union of the proposals/papers. We
mirror the flagship project on GitHub, but all of our development is on
Bitbucket.

------
levosmetalo
To be honest I never understood the value proposal of Github. Ok, you get git
repository hosting, and list of projects, and that's pretty much about it,
with the ability to browse code online without cloning. Besides, that, I
personally find most of the features useless. For example issue tracker is
unusable, concept of forks is just a small convinience that doesn't add any
real value. And about the most praised feature, like pull request, I find it
just annoying and too much work. As a potential committer, it's much easier to
me to clone the original repo and send a format-patch set then to bother
creating my fork, cloning the fork, creating branch, pushing branch and
writing an issue. As a maintainer, I also find it more convenient to just deal
with format-patch set or an url to repo/branch than to deal with Github pull
request system. And Linus tends to agree with me on this ;)

That all being said, I still use Github for OS projects for visibility, I just
don't accept pull requests, and Bitbucket for private projects because of
unlimited free private repos. And I find them both useful, just not
groundbraeking.

~~~
andybak
First some context - I'm by no means a Git power-user. I learnt it under
duress and would have much preferred Mercurial but at that point it was
obvious which way the wind was blowing.

Back in SVN days I also used to be quite fond of Google Code as it is was much
cleaner and simpler than Github to my eyes (bearing in mind that a lot of Git
terminology was unfamiliar to me back then).

But once I learnt enough Git to get by, I started to love Github.

My standard workflow when I need to use a 3rd party app for a project is:

1\. Find the original repo on Github, 2\. Browse the network to see if any of
the forks are more actively maintained or have enough additions to be worth
considering pulling from. 3\. Fork the best fork to my own account. 4\. Make
the changes I need and issue pull requests if I think upstream would be
interested.

I've never learnt how to use patch sets. If someone sends me a pull request,
it's 2 clicks to merge it. I'm sure patch sets aren't terribly hard but I
can't see how they'd be easier than that.

~~~
levosmetalo
> I've never learnt how to use patch sets. If someone sends me a pull request,
> it's 2 clicks to merge it. I'm sure patch sets aren't terribly hard but I
> can't see how they'd be easier than that.

It's a few clicks if all you want is just to _blindly_ accept and merge it,
without having it on your own computer before merging and being able to
compile it, run a test suite, or perform some non trivial modifications to
patch.

For this purpose, to me is much easier to just apply the patch set in my local
tree, or add a new remote and checkout branch then to deal with github pull
request.

~~~
andybak
What is this 'compile' of which you speak?

(and slightly more sadly) What is this 'test suite' of which you speak? :-(

------
tasoeur
The only reason why I switched to BitBucket is "free unlimited private
repository". GitHub is great, I used to love it as a student, it also was a
great asset when applying for jobs. But now, I'm in a company that
unfortunately do not allow me to do OpenSource anymore, and bitbucket was a
great solution. If GitHub was to offer a few free private repos (other than if
you are a student), I believe that bitbucket would be in a bad position...

~~~
sdegutis
Last year, I switched from Github to BitBucket because of the unlimited free
private repositories. Shortly after, I switched back to Github for _everything
else Github offers_.

~~~
jdhendrickson
Would you mind detailing what that everything else actually is?

~~~
LinaLauneBaer
We (objective-cloud.com) are using Bitbucket for our private repos as well.
But once our stuff has matured a bit we open source it as frameworks on github
and manage issues/documentation there.

We love open source and want to contribute back. Since most people are on
github and not on bitbucket we open source our stuff on github. Just to make
it easier for the community.

The missing/invisible bitbucket community is certainly a big thing... :(

------
Sander_Marechal
My company uses BitBucket because of the unlimited private repositories. We
are a small company with just a handful of developers, but our existing
Subversion repository contains over 200 projects. Most are not really active,
as in being developed. But the majority do get the occasional bugfix. Even
Github's largest enterprise plan is too small to convert out Subversion
repositories, because on Github you pay for the amount of private
repositories. With Bitbucket we can use their cheapest $10 plan because they
carge by developer, not by repository.

------
compay
If I recall correctly, the author of the article linked here apologized for
its tone and removed it from his blog. It seems a bit of a disservice to
repost it here without mentioning that context.

~~~
hbien
I googled for a bit, but couldn't find an apology from this author. I do
remember a different author writing a similar post, followed by an apology and
removal though. I don't think it's the same author.

(edit: here's the apology we were thinking of
[http://schacon.github.io/bitbucket.html](http://schacon.github.io/bitbucket.html))

------
spbhat1989
BitBucket - Unlimited private repos for free. I don't care of anything else.

------
ballard
Bitbucket: unlimited free private repos

GH: popularity

~~~
flurdy
Yeah that is about it. My private repos are replicated to bitbucket, with a
couple of public ones. Most of my public projects are all on Github.

Github is as you say popular, and has partially become a CV/resume replacement
so that it is risky to not have an active account on GH. Also project
discovery and sharing on the one popular site is much more likely to happen.

No-one finds my bitbucket projects unless I tell them about it. Perhaps if
github extended the fork link for a project to upstream/downstream links to
external sites it would get more traffic. But that would probably not be in
Github's economic interest.

This is as a person, for a company there might be different scenarios of what
is important. If costs are important then bitbucket is probably a better
start. However after a while Stash, Github Enterprise, Gitorious, Gitlab etc
will be more suitable for day-to-day hosting.

~~~
_random_
"has partially become a CV/resume replacement so that it is risky to not have
an active account on GH" \- LOL, where? Do people even have time to check your
repos?

~~~
flurdy
Obviously 'we' know that most github repos are mostly rubbish experimental
garbage (at least mine are), but many startup recruiters that I have met have
filtering/scoring on whether a potential candidate has a github account and
even a further qualifier if that account is active or dormant.

I don't think they go beyond that as they probably don't have the skillset for
that, nor do they check any other code hosting sites.

But for the anonymous early filtering to get your foot in the door it makes
sense to have a semi active github account until you get reviewed by/speak to
a proper technical interviewer at which point that sugaring is unnecessary.

~~~
_random_
Makes sense. I might add a phrase "I don't use GitHub because I prefer ...
instead of GitHub." to improve keyword matching in my CV...

------
enscr
I like BitBucket because I like & use Hg. After playing around with both Git &
Hg & comparing their merits, I decided, it was Hg for me. What's with all the
hate on the author's part?

------
james-skemp
I'm in a weird position (although I assume I'm not the only one) that's using
both services and paying Github for their first level.

There's something to be said about having all my projects in one place, which
is why everything is on GH and I'm starting to duplicate private repos to BB.

Competition is fierce in the space right now, but I'd feel better if BB was
charging some tiny amount for a year of unlimited private repos (like $5 or
$10). I think I'd feel much more comfortable they weren't going to retire it.

------
deevus
How surprising that two sites for managing DVCSs look similar when presenting
the same information.

------
taspeotis
If you use "Search Term" vs. "Website" you get different results, but for what
it's worth:
[http://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=GitHub%2C%20BitBuc...](http://www.google.com.au/trends/explore#q=GitHub%2C%20BitBucket%2C%20Launchpad%2C%20SourceForge%2C%20CodePlex&cmpt=q)

------
mosselman
Fun comparison. It seems that Bitbucket was ahead of GitHub, seeing that
Github's current look resembles that of Bitbucket 3 years ago.

For comparison's sake it would have been fun to see screenshots of today's
products next to the old ones as well.

------
enscr
There's an advantage for the end user if the layout of the sites is similar -
Intuitive browsing.

Imagine if each email service provider re-invented the layout of mailbox !

------
hlmencken
Git is a product that's really replicable in any space. I for one, use gh when
projects are hosted there and bb when they are there. Git makes it trivial to
move things around quickly if cost becomes an issue. Also, i generally find
working with git through a browser to be tenacious. I find sourcetree to be
far more powerful than GH's client but still think all the thanks goes to Mr.
Torvald. what a guy.

------
krick
I'm surprised that somebody cares enough to post this kind of article on HN.
By the way I feel really sad about BitBucket being so much less popular than
Github, while having important advantages (hg + closed repos) over it. I mean
I'd rather use mercurial, but I'm using git because repo on github is still so
much better for PR purposes. But c'est la vie, so whatever.

------
reledi
What I found most interesting is being able to see how much GitHub has
changed. The progress is amazing, keep iterating!

~~~
Gigablah
BitBucket has changed a lot, too. In fact I'd argue certain aspects of its UI
are superior to GitHub's.

------
LoganCale
As a freelance developer, GitHub is useless for me as a git hosting service,
because with the number of repositories I need to keep up as remotes I would
be paying a ridiculous monthly fee.

I like BitBucket's model of unlimited private repos and charging by the number
of people accessing them instead.

~~~
halostatue
If you have been added to an organization, your fork of their private code—if
you choose to do it that way—costs you nothing (that is, it does not add to
your used private repo count).

I've only done this because I was curious and had a slot available to waste if
it did cause a problem. With the organizations that I've worked with, I've
just always been added to their organization and repo and just used local
copies with their GitHub repo as origin.

------
_random_
How many of those GitHub repositories are actually 10-20 line "Ruby gems" and
"JavaScript libraries"?

------
not_with_retard
I hope not everyone at GitHub is so afraid of BitBucket that they need to
slander it with an article. Don't they know whining gets you nowhere?

I personally didn't see any striking resemblance between any of the pages.
Most have obvious content which needs to be displayed (seriously, this guy is
complaining about the source code tree being shown the same way? SERIOUSLY?
How else do you expect them to display it?).

Probably doesn't help that I enjoy the layout of BitBucket more, but this
article has been the kick in the shins I needed to get off of GitHub for good.
There's obviously something that BitBucket is doing correctly to warrant this
amount of attention from the employees of Github, might as well jump ship
before it sinks.

~~~
jkrems
The article is from 2011 and the author apparently (see top comment)
apologized and took it from his blog. Also look at Google Code, trac, ...
there's nothing "obvious" about the layout, there are plenty alternatives.

~~~
lotyrin
Exactly, in 2014, Github has tons of clones. Lots more sites have reduced
visual clutter nice user flows and allow for social interaction. Both in VCS
and in general, what Github is doing is not innovative. In that context, yeah
this seems pretty dumb.

Github was the first VCS hosting service that took design seriously and kept
clutter and bullshit off of all of these different pages (or provided them
all). They were the first VCS hosting that realized the power of social
interactions around code, before every app under the sun had a social
timeline.

