Bitbucket vs. GitHub code re­pos­it­ory hosting com­par­is­on

Bitbucket and GitHub are the preferred re­pos­it­ory hosting services for de­vel­op­ment with the version man­age­ment Git. They are suitable for private open-source projects as well as for teaching in­sti­tu­tions or com­mer­cial pro­gram­ming. What are the key dif­fer­ences and sim­il­ar­it­ies?

What are Bitbucket and GitHub?

Bitbucket and GitHub are re­pos­it­ory hosting services with free and paid offerings that let you host private and public re­pos­it­or­ies for de­vel­op­ment projects in a variety of pro­gram­ming languages. Both are suitable for people with extensive pro­gram­ming knowledge as well as for users who are just learning pro­gram­ming.

GitHub

GitHub is not only con­sidered one of the most important and popular de­vel­op­ment platforms, but also offers one of the largest coding com­munit­ies with over 40 million active members and more than 100 million code re­pos­it­or­ies. Founded in 2004 as an open-source hosting platform for source code, GitHub has been owned by Microsoft since 2018. The platform focuses on public, free and unlimited re­pos­it­or­ies. GitHub was written in Ruby and Erlang. Over 200 pro­gram­ming languages are supported.

Bitbucket

Bitbucket was founded in 2008 by software company Atlassian. Bitbucket provides free private and public re­pos­it­or­ies as a version man­age­ment hosting platform. The hosting service can also be extended with various tools and services from Atlassian. These include the Jira tool for bug man­age­ment and project man­age­ment and the Trello tool for col­lab­or­a­tion and or­gan­isa­tion. Bitbucket was written in Python and is built on the Django web ap­plic­a­tion framework. Unlike GitHub, Bitbucket offers a smaller community and em­phas­ises private re­pos­it­or­ies.

Why is good code re­pos­it­ory hosting important?

Code re­pos­it­or­ies serve as a sup­ple­ment and found­a­tion for de­vel­op­ment projects that you can realise alone or in a team using pro­gram­ming languages, code editors and version control systems such as Git and SVN. Depending on the re­quire­ments, a code re­pos­it­ory or re­pos­it­ory hosting serves as a central man­age­ment point and de­vel­op­ment platform that ensures the best possible workflow.

While version control systems such as Git clearly document and manage code changes and project histories, a hosted re­pos­it­ory offers the advantage that tools for or­gan­isa­tion, ad­min­is­tra­tion, com­mu­nic­a­tion and history storage are already in­teg­rated and centrally ac­cess­ible.

Offerings and scope of services differ depending on the host. However, good re­pos­it­ory hosting should include the following functions in any case:

• Code review (Code Review)
• Two-factor au­then­tic­a­tion
• Re­pos­it­ory creation via website or command line
• Inline editing
• Markdown support
• History/project doc­u­ment­a­tion and issue tracking
• Third-party tool in­teg­ra­tion
• Free private/data protected re­pos­it­or­ies
• Code access and per­mis­sions for team members and col­lab­or­at­ors
• User-friendly interface
• Price/per­form­ance models to suit your needs

What are sim­il­ar­it­ies of Bitbucket and GitHub?

The following common services and features are offered by both systems for efficient pro­gram­ming and powerful workflow:

• Free packages: Bitbucket offers a free package for teams of up to five people and unlimited public and private re­pos­it­or­ies with 1 GB of storage. GitHub, in turn, offers unlimited public and private re­pos­it­or­ies for unlimited people with 500 MB of storage
• Paid-for packages: Depending on the re­quire­ments of the team size, or­gan­isa­tion, monthly minutes needed, and projects. Services, number of users, and storage volume can be cus­tom­ised through paid usage packages.
• Col­lec­tion and man­age­ment of snippets: Both services offer col­lec­tions of code snippets that are publicly main­tained and enhanced by the re­spect­ive community or privately created by teams for re­spect­ive projects
• 2FA: Secure 2-factor au­then­tic­a­tion allows team members to access code re­pos­it­or­ies only by password and after a second security check. While 2FA is included out of the box with GitHub, it can be added to Bitbucket via the Atlassian Mar­ket­place.
• Wiki: Both Bitbucket and GitHub offer ac­com­pa­ny­ing source code project doc­u­ment­a­tion to fa­cil­it­ate col­lab­or­a­tion and clearly document code changes.
• Code reviews: With built-in code review, both hosting services offer tools for error checking or sim­pli­fy­ing and op­tim­ising code sections
• Access per­mis­sion: Depending on the size and com­pos­i­tion of the de­vel­op­ment team, access per­mis­sions or re­stric­tions can be set as needed at the team or branch level.
• Community and tutorials: Both hosting services have active com­munit­ies and numerous Bitbucket, GitHub and Git tutorials. Tutorials that provide ap­pro­pri­ate, quick solutions to questions and problems.

What are dif­fer­ences between Bitbucket and GitHub?

Despite all their sim­il­ar­it­ies, there are important dif­fer­ences between Bitbucket and GitHub. The biggest dif­fer­ence lies in the type of re­pos­it­or­ies. Although GitHub also allows private re­pos­it­or­ies in principle, it is con­sidered the first choice when it comes to creating and using public code re­pos­it­or­ies. Bitbucket focuses on private code re­pos­it­or­ies.

Other dif­fer­ences between Bitbucket and GitHub:

• In­teg­ra­tion of third-party software: Bitbucket offers more than 2,000 apps and tools for project man­age­ment, code mon­it­or­ing, code review and more, thanks to the Atlassian Mar­ket­place. GitHub also offers numerous third-party tools with the GitHub Mar­ket­place, but unlike Bitbucket, they are not from the same man­u­fac­turer.
• User interface: Bitbucket’s user interface is very clear and offers easy nav­ig­a­tion and search including a practical sidebar menu. GitHub also has a clear user interface, but it is slightly more difficult for beginners to un­der­stand.
• Func­tion­al­ity of the Wikis: With Bitbucket, separate wikis can be activated for each re­pos­it­ory and made available either publicly or privately. GitHub, on the other hand, lets you enable custom wikis for public re­pos­it­or­ies only
• Access per­mis­sion pricing: Although access per­mis­sions are offered as needed by both services, unlike GitHub, Bitbucket offers custom branch per­mis­sions even in the free package. Access to in­di­vidu­al or selected branches for specific team members can therefore be con­figured for free. Pre­defined branch per­mis­sions, on the other hand, can only be used for free with GitHub for private re­pos­it­or­ies.
• Community En­gage­ment: GitHub has a very large and very active community. This is com­ple­men­ted by an ex­per­i­enced community support team made up of know­ledge­able de­velopers who provide reliable answers and solutions to questions and problems. Bitbucket also offers support through its own, but smaller community, as well as various tutorials and doc­u­ment­a­tion
• Pricing: Bitbucket caters well to small teams with its pricing packages, and also to companies that value self-managed hosting, lots of storage space, unlimited users and maximum security. GitHub also offers packages for large teams and en­ter­prises but is primarily the most popular solution for open source projects used to create public code re­pos­it­or­ies.
• Search functions: Bitbucket includes the powerful ‘omnibar’ with multiple nav­ig­a­tion options and a semantic search that outputs not only changes and labels of variables, but also defin­i­tions. GitHub, in turn, offers diverse search options that include ‘hot re­pos­it­or­ies’, search trends, or job listings.
• Privacy: Bitbucket is the first Git solution to offer reliable privacy and data security for stored source code. In addition, the Bitbucket cloud has an in­de­pend­ently validated SOC 2Type II cer­ti­fic­a­tion.

The most important dif­fer­ences are listed below: