
BitBucket vs. GitLab.com - jobvandervoort
https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/15/bitbucket-vs-gitlab-com/
======
Fastidious
It is not BitBucket vs. GitLab, as nothing is noted on BitBucket, but only
GitLab. Their title should have been, "Look, it is GitLab, use it!"

I think GitLab is great, but still prefer GitHub: no need to worry about
hardware failures, or management. Someone does that for me, and does it well.

~~~
sytse
GitLab CEO here. If you don't want to worry about hosting it yourself (which I
totally understand) please consider using GitLab.com
[https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/)
it has unlimited private repo's for free.

~~~
stephengoodwin
Just out of curiosity, do you know the marginal costs of hosting a free
private repo? How much of your upkeep costs are hosting free repos vs paid?

~~~
sytse
There are no paid repo's, all repo's are free. The costs are very limited (low
single digit thousands). We pay for it with money we get from on-premises
subscribers. We think this will be like email, the storage costs can be offset
with other income. Instead of advertising we're thinking about offering a
marketplace (similar to what Heroku does). But that is a long term plan, for
the next few years we're focussed on growing it.

------
skywhopper
"GitLab is beautifully designed. Just look at it"

Thanks to the GitHub designers for saving GitLab a lot of work, I guess? Most
of the GitLab design, almost all of the abstractions and interaction patterns,
and even some of the UI text comes straight out of GitHub.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but GitLab feels like the
webapp version of one of those GPL clones of a Microsoft app.

~~~
jobvandervoort
GitLab is being build using Bootstrap, in part so it makes it easy for our
hundreds current and potential thousands of other developers to contribute.

I'm sure everyone has inspirations, but a quick look at GitLab and GitHub
makes it clear that the two have diverged considerably in terms of design.

Lastly, we do believe that we have much to learn in terms of design and UX.
We'd love to receive contributions and concrete feedback that help us with
this.

~~~
ThatGeoGuy
While this doesn't add much to the discussion, I found your package pricing to
be somewhat confusing (perhaps this is a typo?) [1]. I highlighted the
sentence within the image, but effectively it says "$9.90 per per user/year in
multiples of 20 users". I think the "per per user/year" reads strangely, since
I translate that as "per per user per year".

As another side question, suppose I sign up for a GitLab account and have
repositories there. Is it possible to import / move them easily if I later
decide to host my own instance? I noticed that you said it's easy to migrate
from Bitbucket / Github, but can repos be moved between GitLab instances
easily?

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/C9rFh0K.png](http://i.imgur.com/C9rFh0K.png)

~~~
jobvandervoort
Thanks for spotting the typo, fixed. It should be per user, per year.

> As another side question, suppose I sign up for a GitLab account and have
> repositories there. Is it possible to import / move them easily if I later
> decide to host my own instance? I noticed that you said it's easy to migrate
> from Bitbucket / Github, but can repos be moved between GitLab instances
> easily?

If you have a large amount of repositories, you can import them directly,
rather than simply pushing them to the new server. Of course, we're happy to
help you with this if needed.

------
M8
The major flaw of GitLab is using Git. After having used something as logical
as Mercurial it's kinda hard to switch. Besides I don't care about social and
Torvalds-hype.

~~~
jobvandervoort
Currently the majority of developers and organisations are using Git. This
makes it more interesting for us to focus on Git, rather than support other
DVCS's.

~~~
M8
That's understandable - from business point of view. I bet you would just use
SVN instead of innovating with a new DVCS ~7 years ago. Safe choice is a safe
choice.

~~~
rgbrgb
git is 10 years old [1]. mercurial is 9 years old [2]. git won.

Way back when I was looking at both (7 years ago maybe?), it seemed that
mercurial's main selling point was functional equivalence to git with a
"better" architecture and source language. This is the ultimate case study in
the fact that neither of those things matter to users (even deeply technical
users) unless they impact user experience (stability, performance, UI, etc).

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_\(software\))
[2]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercurial](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercurial)

~~~
isxek
Let's be clear: they were both created in the same year and the same month
(April 2005). Not trying to be pedantic here.

------
d0100
I have used both bitbucket and, recently, gitlab for personal projects and
projects for small companies. I can't say much for x-feature or another, but
gitlab just feels "easier".

~~~
jobvandervoort
This is great to hear, assuming 'easier' is good.

We're working hard at making GitLab feel better, by spending more time on
design and UX, taking inspiration from Slack and Apple.

We'd love to get feedback on this.

------
justinsb
I'm not sure I understand the strategic benefit of the #3 player attacking the
#2 player, particularly when the leader is so far ahead in terms of market
share.

Why don't GitLab & BitBucket instead collaborate, for example by producing a
decentralized & offline-capable version of GitHub's key features (issues, pull
requests)?

Once you're #1 and #2, then you can turn your guns on each other!

~~~
jobvandervoort
Issues and pull requests are already available in GitLab! Actually, in terms
of features GitLab has some more to offer than GitHub.

We also published about us vs. GH:
[https://about.gitlab.com/2015/01/20/github-enterprise-vs-
git...](https://about.gitlab.com/2015/01/20/github-enterprise-vs-gitlab-
enterprise-edition/)

and even have a page on our site dedicated to it:
[https://about.gitlab.com/better-than-
github/](https://about.gitlab.com/better-than-github/)

In terms of comparing us to #3, we want to show everyone, not just people
using GH, what GitLab is. This helps people finding us.

------
Grue3
I didn't know Gitlab provided its own hosting, so I went with Bitbucket for my
private repo. Now I'm using (self-hosted) Gitlab at work and definitely prefer
its interface over Bitbucket's. Either way, for private repos Github is
probably the worst option of the three.

~~~
me_bx
I'm curious: what's wrong with Github private repos?

~~~
glesica
Expensive. That's basically it. We are using Bitbucket for that reason. We
aren't a large team, but we do have quite a few repos. On Github we'd be
paying $50-100 per month, on Bitbucket we pay nothing. Not a big deal for a
heavily funded company, but we're bootstrapping for the most part, so it's a
big deal for us.

Of course that might not be a sustainable state of affairs in a big picture
sense, but it works for us for right now.

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monksy
I love Gitlab but the biggest issue I have with it is that I'm a major version
behind and on the minor version of .8 or soemething.

For me to migrate I'll have to upgrade to the minor versions until I get to
the latest. Thats a huge pain. Is there any other way?

~~~
jobvandervoort
You can upgrade straight to the latest version. Send us a message at support
at gitlab dot com and we can double check it for you.

~~~
sytse
Whether you can upgrade depends on the major version your are on now (newer
versions can be upgraded more easily), as Job said, we're happy to check for
you.

~~~
monksy
I have version 6.9.3.

~~~
sytse
You should be able to go straight to the latest version, see
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/blob/master/doc/upda...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/blob/master/doc/update/6.x-or-7.x-to-7.10.md)

------
zackmorris
I've been using BitBucket and also GitHub a ton the last few months, and while
the core mission of hosting a repo works well, has anyone else noticed a
distinct lack of features on these sites?

For example we had a brief crisis because we deleted branches after merging
them into dev and found that we needed to rewind and merge them again. It took
considerable research to figure out how to resurrect a branch from the reflog
and finally from just the log, where we discovered subtleties like --no-ff
that added friction (or at least the fear of it).

Why don’t these sites simply provide GUIs for common tasks like rewinding,
undeleting branches/files, as well as the countless other things that users
need?

~~~
jobvandervoort
Sounds you have some good ideas Zack! I'd love it if you can submit some of
them to feedback.gitlab.com.

We use the feedback intensively to improve GitLab.

------
talhoffer
Ok. But why would I want to use GitLab over GitHub?

~~~
jobvandervoort
Great question. GitLab is free, open source and you can host it on your own
server. If you don't want to host it yourself, use GitLab.com for free, incl
unlimited public, private repos, collaborators.

On top of that, we have some awesome features that put us ahead of GH:
[https://about.gitlab.com/better-than-
github/](https://about.gitlab.com/better-than-github/)

------
bernadus_edwin
suggestions:

1\. Put free price / comunity product on price plan

2\. Provide simple guide and script to convert existing bitbucket hg to git
(because people are lazy)

~~~
sytse
What do you mean with the first suggestion? We have a Bitbucket importer
already, I'm not sure if it works with Gh repo's though.

~~~
bernadus_edwin
the free private repo information only available on homepage and sign in page.
usually what i'm doing is look at the price plan and then find word free or
zero dollar

~~~
sytse
I think you're looking at the price plan page of an on-premises installation
[https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/](https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/) If you
search for free on that page you'll find GitLab CE and "Sign up for our free
GitLab.com service if you want to use GitLab without installing it."

------
jackmaney
I work at an Enterprisey Financial Institution, and I'm glad that GitLab
exists. If it weren't for the ability to self-host GitLab servers, we'd almost
certainly be using SVN, if not something horrible like CVS, TFS, etc.

~~~
sytse
Glad to hear that! We estimate that there are over 100.000 organizations like
you where people can use git with a good web interface because of GitLab
Community Edition.

