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Github has the social aspects nailed down, but for small teams or personal projects, I don't hesitate to use bitbucket. Particularly now that you can use HipCha

Github has the social aspects nailed down, but for small teams or personal projects, I don't hesitate to use bitbucket. Particularly now that you can use HipChat for free on small teams, hosting with bitbucket and managing your project exclusively through Atlassian is fantastic. I like issue management in bitbucket much more than github, as well (personal opinion, no great foundation here).

tshepang 13y ago
What does "social aspects" mean? Number of users and/or something else?
- jpreiland 13y ago
  I would imagine the ease of sharing, searching, following, comments/discussion, pull requests, etc. I don't have any experience with Bitbucket yet other than making an account and poking around with the interface, so I don't really have a frame of reference, but GitHub does seem to do the above things quite well in my relatively limited experience.
- imperialWicket 13y ago
  GitHub definitely has more users (4.4m claimed https://github.com/features/community https://github.com/features/community), but I meant the social interaction capabilities and features that GitHub offers. GitHub is much more organized around community and public feedback (search, stars, comments, etc.), than BitBucket. IMO, neither is claiming to be something they aren't. It just happens that for private repos and hosting where the focus isn't discoverability or community-driven, BitBucket seems like an easy choice. However, if you want to integrate with communities or popular open source groups/code - GitHub is probably a better option. They're both great overlays for Git, it's just important to keep in mind where their core focus is. For GitHub, community is clearly a front-runner. BitBucket is more focused on private repo options and process management/tools. I put some sweeping claims in this comment, but there's a lot of really good data in this post to supplement.
  - 6ren 13y ago
    I think it helps to think in terms of their revenue model - might help predict what features they develop too: - bitbucket wants enterprise developers to use it. (so it must be free for the private repos the enterprise needs). It's a gateway drug. - github wants its offering to be directly valuable to its users (which might be open-source, startup, small, medium or enterprise team). This predicts that github will be a better as a whole package (including issue tracking etc); and bitbucket will be great for git itself. But there's also much commonality: they both want to attract new users; "viral marketing" (in the sense of social projects pulling more people into the ecosystem) is helpful to both. But I think bitbucket sells itself as "free private repos* so there isn't really an overlap. I predict that bitbucket must not become a viable alternative to atlassian's paid offerings; but github isn't restricted in that way (of course, they might well add paid offerings). It seems there's also a danger for bitbucket: if users adopt their issue-tracking etc, it might be painful to upgrade; and so users might as well switch to github or other. Bitbucket should have an auto-upgrade (or, I guess their present issue tracking could evolve into a freemium model... that probably makes the most sense).
    - blablabla123 13y ago
      Great description, never thought of bitbucket as a gateway drug but absolutely true. Although I don't really get what you mean about issue-tracking. You mean upgrading to Jira?
outworlder 13y ago
For personal projects or two person projects, Kiln is available for free. For larger teams, one of the advantages is that you can use Mercurial and Git interchangeably in the same project. Also, with the startup edition you get Fogbugz, which is pretty decent - and certainly lightyears ahead of github issues. Note: I have no relationship with FogCreek, but I've added a few personal projects there and so far I have no complaints.
- gustavo_duarte 13y ago
  I respectfully disagree regarding Fogbugz vs. GitHub issues. I used FogBugz for about 6 years in a major client project (a successful SaaS product). We used FogCreek's hosted solution and were pretty heavy users: different projects, milestones, feature requests, user communication, etc. However, we were unhappy with FogBugz. The UI always felt clunky and slow to navigate, it felt like we were battling FB rather than getting help from it. In particular, milestone / release management and issue grouping were painful. Then late last year we moved our repos to GH, and decided to look for another issue management system. We evaluated several: JIRA sucked hard imho, JetBrains YouTrack was my favorite full-featured product. But then we decided to give GH issue management a try. It is minimalist and surely lacked some features, but hey, if it could handle our needs, the simplicity would be a huge plus. A few months later, _everyone_ in the team is thrilled: devs, testers, support personnel. Using milestones and labels we have been able to manage more people and more work on GH (we're growing) with less hassle. It feels much friendlier than FogBugz. Now whenever I create / solve / assign / organize issues, I feel happy, whereas before it was a dreaded chore. YMMV of course, but I wanted to give my 2c since I do have a lot of experience with both issue managers.
  - 6ren 13y ago
    Just a nit on GH issues: email vs web don't mix. Email formatting isn't rendered properly online (line breaks, "> " quoting) - and you can't edit an issue/comment online if you originally mailed it in (it's type is email, and that's it). Editing online is incredibly slow on small machines (zenmode is much faster, but you can't preview).
namdnay 13y ago
I don't understand why they offer an Enterprise version of Stash, but not Bitbucket! I do SCM migrations for companies, and I find people pick up Hg a lot faster than Git. But no enterprise customer is going to use an externally hosted solution.

tshepang 13y ago

What does "social aspects" mean? Number of users and/or something else?

jpreiland 13y ago
I would imagine the ease of sharing, searching, following, comments/discussion, pull requests, etc. I don't have any experience with Bitbucket yet other than making an account and poking around with the interface, so I don't really have a frame of reference, but GitHub does seem to do the above things quite well in my relatively limited experience.
imperialWicket 13y ago
GitHub definitely has more users (4.4m claimed https://github.com/features/community https://github.com/features/community), but I meant the social interaction capabilities and features that GitHub offers. GitHub is much more organized around community and public feedback (search, stars, comments, etc.), than BitBucket. IMO, neither is claiming to be something they aren't. It just happens that for private repos and hosting where the focus isn't discoverability or community-driven, BitBucket seems like an easy choice. However, if you want to integrate with communities or popular open source groups/code - GitHub is probably a better option. They're both great overlays for Git, it's just important to keep in mind where their core focus is. For GitHub, community is clearly a front-runner. BitBucket is more focused on private repo options and process management/tools. I put some sweeping claims in this comment, but there's a lot of really good data in this post to supplement.
- 6ren 13y ago
  I think it helps to think in terms of their revenue model - might help predict what features they develop too: - bitbucket wants enterprise developers to use it. (so it must be free for the private repos the enterprise needs). It's a gateway drug. - github wants its offering to be directly valuable to its users (which might be open-source, startup, small, medium or enterprise team). This predicts that github will be a better as a whole package (including issue tracking etc); and bitbucket will be great for git itself. But there's also much commonality: they both want to attract new users; "viral marketing" (in the sense of social projects pulling more people into the ecosystem) is helpful to both. But I think bitbucket sells itself as "free private repos* so there isn't really an overlap. I predict that bitbucket must not become a viable alternative to atlassian's paid offerings; but github isn't restricted in that way (of course, they might well add paid offerings). It seems there's also a danger for bitbucket: if users adopt their issue-tracking etc, it might be painful to upgrade; and so users might as well switch to github or other. Bitbucket should have an auto-upgrade (or, I guess their present issue tracking could evolve into a freemium model... that probably makes the most sense).
  - blablabla123 13y ago
    Great description, never thought of bitbucket as a gateway drug but absolutely true. Although I don't really get what you mean about issue-tracking. You mean upgrading to Jira?

outworlder 13y ago

For personal projects or two person projects, Kiln is available for free. For larger teams, one of the advantages is that you can use Mercurial and Git interchangeably in the same project. Also, with the startup edition you get Fogbugz, which is pretty decent - and certainly lightyears ahead of github issues. Note: I have no relationship with FogCreek, but I've added a few personal projects there and so far I have no complaints.

gustavo_duarte 13y ago
I respectfully disagree regarding Fogbugz vs. GitHub issues. I used FogBugz for about 6 years in a major client project (a successful SaaS product). We used FogCreek's hosted solution and were pretty heavy users: different projects, milestones, feature requests, user communication, etc. However, we were unhappy with FogBugz. The UI always felt clunky and slow to navigate, it felt like we were battling FB rather than getting help from it. In particular, milestone / release management and issue grouping were painful. Then late last year we moved our repos to GH, and decided to look for another issue management system. We evaluated several: JIRA sucked hard imho, JetBrains YouTrack was my favorite full-featured product. But then we decided to give GH issue management a try. It is minimalist and surely lacked some features, but hey, if it could handle our needs, the simplicity would be a huge plus. A few months later, _everyone_ in the team is thrilled: devs, testers, support personnel. Using milestones and labels we have been able to manage more people and more work on GH (we're growing) with less hassle. It feels much friendlier than FogBugz. Now whenever I create / solve / assign / organize issues, I feel happy, whereas before it was a dreaded chore. YMMV of course, but I wanted to give my 2c since I do have a lot of experience with both issue managers.
- 6ren 13y ago
  Just a nit on GH issues: email vs web don't mix. Email formatting isn't rendered properly online (line breaks, "> " quoting) - and you can't edit an issue/comment online if you originally mailed it in (it's type is email, and that's it). Editing online is incredibly slow on small machines (zenmode is much faster, but you can't preview).

namdnay 13y ago

I don't understand why they offer an Enterprise version of Stash, but not Bitbucket! I do SCM migrations for companies, and I find people pick up Hg a lot faster than Git. But no enterprise customer is going to use an externally hosted solution.