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Comment by bryanh | Hacker News Reader

For a while I was a bit worried that GitHub had just ran away with the prize and no one else was bothering. It is pretty obvious that Google isn't interested in improving Google Code and that Sourceforge hasn't aged a day (that's not really fair, but it feels like it).

I think there is still a chance for BitBucket to make a splash, but I think its going to be hard to win anymore. That's fine, 2nd place makes a lot of money too (not counting places 1-10 for enterprise source control, which basically print money, and of which GitHub is chasing too).

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Bitbucket had a pretty easy time of winning my business: free private repositories for small teams is a great way to draw people in.

The free private repos are a lifesaver. They also just released a refer a friend program like dropbox. You can get up to 8 users for free. - http://blog.bitbucket.org/2012/09/18/refer-a-friend-to-bitbu...

I like Bitbucket because they support both Mercurial and Git. They also acquired SourceTree (probably the best version control app on the Mac), employed the main developer and made the app free.

I've tried at least a dozen Git GUIs for both PC and Mac and SourceTree is by far my favorite.

Can you elaborate on why? I've found it to be far from intuitive and basically a direct mapping of CLI commands straight into UI elements. A user unfamiliar with command line git arguments would have a difficult time with SourceTree, I would imagine (most of my coworkers have).

A user unfamiliar with command line git arguments would have a difficult time with SourceTree

Let's be honest about git: A user unfamiliar with the CLI commands will have a difficult time, period. I hesitate to predict that it's impossible to create a good UX, but git is a very complicated system with an abstraction that leaks all the way down to database records. Breathe on it wrong and the repository will wedge into a state that sends longime veterans off to stackoverflow.

Yes, git is worth it... but so far every clever GUI has basically been a convenience tool for power users, not a better abstraction that can sidestep the learning curve. It's hard to see how this is going to change without some sort of fundamental change in git.

I recently started keeping some source code in a gist, which github was eager to point out is a full repository. The UI is not very usable, but it's not hard to understand for the non git enlightened like myself. If nothing else, this proves that it's possible to create an easy to use git GUI. (with reduced functionality)

The github GUI for Mac/Windows solves this problem completely, by hiding the vast majority of git's power-user features. (No stage, no no tracking branches, no manual rebasing.)

Oh, how I wish this were so!

Even with fairly boring usage, the Github GUI periodically wedges my repository into a state which requires CLI interaction (and a trip to stackoverflow). It's even worse for newbies - I get desperate pleas for help from clients all the time. I have come to the conclusion that there is no way around teaching the command line first, then giving them the Github client after they achieve competence.

Can you repro that?

Can I repro giving the Github client to newbies and getting desperate pleas for help soon afterwards? Yes, it's consistent :-)

No, I have not tried to reproduce the incidents which screwed up my repository. After a few harrowing experiences I pretty much gave up using the Github for Mac client for anything except basic commits. And even that screws up - I frequently have to commit files twice; it's like the client only stages some of the files, even though they're all checked. If my commits are large I usually go to the command line to avoid the double commit msgs. I'm about to give up entirely.

It... really shouldn't be doing that. What is your precise workflow?

I believe it's Tower that plays that role. I know a designer who uses it, who would be bewildered by the CLI git.

I don't think this is really for programmers though is it? I thought this was more about content/documentation developers.

It looks like it's for programmers to me.

basically a direct mapping of CLI commands straight into UI elements

That may be some of the reason that I like it. I am able to do a lot of the things that I could do from the command line, but with a visual interface to help me visualize what's going on.

For example, when I'm doing a commit, I can click on each file that's been modified and see the diff for that file right on the side. I can then stage all or just parts of the changes. So if I have some debug lines, I can stage the file and then unstage the debug logging so it doesn't get committed.

There's just a lot of little things like that that you CAN do with the git command line yourself, but it wraps up in a way that's easier to consume.

I'd have to take more time than I have now to write up a full review of what I like about it compared to other GUIs.

I haven't seen it mentioned here but Tower for Mac OS has been a great tool for those who are not too familiar with git or it's associated commands. I've recommended it to at least a few hundred clients many of which use it religiously today.

Tower is slow. While a slightly nicer UI, and it running like shit on large repos - at least for work - makes it a non-starter

One more datapoint: can't say I like SourceTree. Still looking for a Mercurial GUI worth using. My biggest issue is that I'm a big user of annotate/blame (I have a very bad memory so finding out where/how/why a given piece of code was created or evolved is something I do at least weekly if not daily) and all the hg guis have absolute shit annotate. They also tend to look rather bad.

GitX is pretty good (I think I still prefer the original one over the Laullon gitx, but the Laullon gitx has an acceptable annotate view and look nice), and surprisingly the best annotate view I've seen so far is in bazaar's qt-based UI. The tools are not necessarily great overall (and the OSX interactions are downright weird), but the annotate is excellent.

I hate how slow it is. After I get to the commit screen it thrashes my CPU and takes ages before my typing shows up.

It's still the best on OSX though.

Email support, they developed has been super responsive.

I personally prefer the simplicity that GitBox gives. (OSX only though)

IMHO, Git-Tower is way better than SourceTree.

Git-Tower is $60. SourceTree is free. Compare accordingly.

If you write software for a living, I would think you would see the value in a good piece of code.

With the $100M investment I now think it's probably a bad business decision for github not to get a bit more aggressive on pricing for those edge cases where bitbucket clearly wins.

it's probably a bad business decision for github not to get a bit more aggressive on pricing for [free private repositories]...

Yes. If Github offered just one free private repo, then I would move to them in a heartbeat.

Github is still Github, after all. ("Second resume" etc.) Unfortunately current circumstances prevent me from open-sourcing a certain small segment of my codebase, and... well... Bitbucket is free, and I'm living on Ramen while trying not to worry about my dwindling savings account. So it's a pretty clear-cut choice for me.

I would prefer if they would tie their pricing to the size of a repository or the number of collaborators, but not the number of repos. I have a paid account that I would like to dump a lot of old projects that I hardly ever change. I would have to upgrade to "large" and even that one wouldn't fit all the projects. Right now the solution is to either not host it with them or use something like Bitbucket.

definitely. hobbyists tend to run to "lots of small repos with low activity on any given one", but the net resource usage is the same as or lower than "a few big repos". per-repo pricing is more a "pay not to be inconvenienced" than "pay for your use of our resources" thing.

For the many-small-repo scenario, I use this technique to host multiple projects under one Github private repository:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1384325/in-git-is-there-a...

Instead of creating a repo per project, I create a orphan branch within a shared repo for that project. The benefit of this approach is that you can always cleanly export the commits into its own repository without altering SHA ids. The con is that you have to pick separate branch names for each project (e.g. proj1-master, proj2-master).

Personally I'm more bummed about a 1 collaborator limit on the $7/mo plan.

Where is this "1 collaborator limit"? GitHub has unlimited collaborators on all repositories, private or public.

there used to be a limit to the number of collaborators, but it was lifted a few months ago.

Cool! I never noticed.

Yes. Especially when you factor in that github does a startlingly bad job of many basic things. Their ticketing system blows, for example -- you can't prioritize anything. Yet they have time to implement a CLI in the search bar...

I moved my personal private repos to BitBucket a long time ago, and haven't looked back.

that's an example of why I stick with Bitbucket and don't bother to switch to Github with my projects although it's so hyped. Bitbucket works great, gets the job done, their commit log beats up the gihub one, and they don't focus on implementing useless bells and whistles.

You can reorder tasks by clicking and dragging, and you can assign discrete priorities with labels. What more do you need?

>What more do you need?

Well, when you've got a large list of things stored on a computer, and you want them displayed in a certain order, automatic sorting (after you assign a priority) is a lot more useful than having to rearrange them manually.

I thought assigning priority labels is manual anyway?

I mean, if you want to build a natural language parser that counts how many times the words "URGENT" and "HELP" appears in the issue and then automatically reorders it, you can do that with the Github issues API anyways, right? I don't know of existing bug trackers that make priority automatic.

You can filter based on labels in github issues, if that's what you meant.

the cli stuff is very simply implemented, but cool nonetheless.

Even better: if you sign up with a .edu email address (hell, even my university email account works and it's a .es), they upgrade your account to unlimited everything, automatically.

GitHub also does a Educational plan, but it requires manual requests and IIRC they give you a Micro account. So Bitbucket is the default choice for all my shared class projects.

Thanks for the tip, I signed up for free private repos, but this makes me a real fan.

Thank you! My Swedish university address worked as well. Just created also an unlimited team account for my research group. This is exactly what I have been wishing Github would do for a couple of years now.

What if you signed up with your personal account? Is there a way to upgrade by changing your email address to an *.edu email address?

yeah, just add the address and confirm it and it's automatic. I've shown this to a few friends, so I know it works (or at least, it has in the past).

free private repositories for small teams is a great way to draw people in.

Same thing here. I used to pay for github for a private repo for code to a couple of apps I sell. Once I found BB, it was a no brainer to switch over.

If free private repos is the only thing that BitBucket offers over GitHub, then they'll not be in business for long.

You cost them money.

Until your team grows above 5 people, at which point you make them money. The loss-leader is a tried and true business model.

BitBucket has already been in business for a long time, it appears GitHub is not a fan of free private repos. In the early stages that was probably a help because your site looks more active if everyone using it is public, but these days the lack of free private repos is pretty surprising.

Mercurial support is what has helped BitBucket a lot.

Yes exactly. I've noticed a lot of open-source Python projects use Mercurial on BB - there is still some community segmentation. I would think as people get tired of Google Code remaining static and backwards compared to BB that more Mercurial projects will move to BB from Google. The BB UI was pretty weak compared to Github before today. I'm glad to see this.

I use BB for the free private Git repos but had always planned to switch to paid Github once I actually need collaborators. Now I could see staying with BB when I need to go paid.

I think so, too. I started off with Mercurial (and still prefer it, if I'm working on solo projects) before moving to Git, and by then Bitbucket had already won me over :).

It's a different way to price products - they charge per user. So, if your little startup starts growing, they bring in a bit of cash and have opportunities to up-sell with the other products in their line.

If my startup grew past 5 team members, I would personally just move my private repos to GitHub and start paying them. Bitbucket provides a great free service, but I'd probably never pay for it.

You just might reconsider (and that is what bb is banking on), at the end of the day having to police the number of repos you can have is a pain(esp in a startup, where people are seemingly forever going off to hack away on random stuff). Sure bb isnt as pretty--current redraw notwithstanding--but unlimited repos is very handy indeed. just saying. Inline commenting was missed (we moved from gh to bb a few months ago), but i see that has been released too.

It also integrates with several atlassian products, namely Jira which in my opinion beats github's issue tracker into the dust.

A notepad blows Github's issue tracker away. It's by far the least impressive part of the product.

Interesting. I use Github's issue tracker every day and love it to bits.

Does it integrate with Pivotal Tracker? Jira is a pain in the ass.

I was drawn in by Mercurial, went to GitHub when I switched to Git (the only thing that was holding me back, frankly) but left my private repositories on BitBucket, still in Mercurial. I shall be converting them to git and committing to sticking with BitBucket for all of my private repositories now!

Can someone explain whats the catch ?

Looks like I can host my $22 github account for free on bitbucket.

there is no catch. their business model is not on repo count, but collaborators count. in other words, solo devs and very small teams can freeride, if you grow bigger you start paying.

also, it's backed up by Atlassian.

I wouldn't say Atlassian is an asset. Jira is horrible.

For me Jira is great, apart from the fact that our corporate install is quite slow sometimes it's the best bug tracking software I've used.

I take great issue with that statement ;)

You can.

BitBucket is run by Atlassian, their goal is to later upsell you to their line of products, so they loss lead with free unlimited private repos in the hope that if you need a project management/bugtracker system you might choose JIRA.

It's not as popular and the site isn't as responsive (UI wise) as Github. But other than that it's pretty awesome. It supports Git for some time too.

No catch, I've been using it for years, and always wondered why people preferred github.

Same here.

Bitbucket for opensource things Stash for our firm's repos behind the firewall.

And i have been using github for years, paid account, like others. Paid github vs Atlassian Stash ? Stash wins.

How long will it take for the private repos to be hacked? Would you put the company revenue generating jewels in there?

Do you think it's more or less likely to get hacked than private repositories on github (which are already trusted by many companies)?

Before you answer, consider http://www.extremetech.com/computing/120981-github-hacked-mi...

The crown jewels should always be kept under lock and key!

A couple of years ago I was at one of the Github drink meetups. I asked if they were working on encrypted private repos (this was just before or around the time Github Firewall was introduced). A Github employee told me no… before adding that in his opinion source code was not valuable.

I asked him to clarify and he said imagine if Twitter had their source code leaked. It wouldn't be a big issue as Twitters success was built more on business execution rather than code. A valid point perhaps but small indie developers could easily be put out of business if the source code to their unique selling point or competitive advantage were to be made public.

I'm sure Github (and others) take security seriously, but given the above, caveat emptor!

Did you ask him for Github's source code?

Hosted repos can only be so secure. If you need absolute trust, host them on your own machines (for which GitHub and Atlassian will happily sell you tools to make doing so easier).

I think there's a lot of truth in this attitude, I sometimes think 'if someone can take our code without all our knowledge and do something useful with it better than we can, then they deserve to win', having said that, I also strongly suggest that it would be bad for GitHubs business for it to be widely known that they have this attitude...

Twitter is a service.

Actually, that's why I brought it up. Unless the cost analysis justifies the risk, I wouldn't host a repo on bitbucket or github.

For what it's worth, all of Atlassian's company revenue generating jewels are hosted on Bitbucket, so security is fairly important to us. :)

You're giving out your product's source code to customers anyway. How is hosting slightly newer versions of it on your own servers a big thing?

They've got a good shot, because a lot of people need private repositories and do NOT need the social features of Github. They just need a basic git server to hold the master repository. For doing their work, the built-in tools of git are sufficient.

For such people, Github is ridiculously expensive, since their price is based on the number of repositories you have. For instance, at work we've got enough repositories (all small) that we'd need the $200/month Github plan. In terms of storage costs, that works out to about $10/megabyte/month.

That's 5 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more than the market rate for cloud storage. When you are selling something 5 orders of magnitude above the market rate, there is room for competitors.

Isn't that like complaining about Apple selling the iPhone at over $100/ounce?

I don't contest that there are probably people who only need a remote git repo and nothing else. But those companies that would service them either compete on features or get pushed down to wholesale cloud storage prices, a place you don't want to be unless you're Amazon.

Thats maybe a day of single developer's work - less if you actually pay your startup dev's market value.

Paying for a service that can double or triple a developer's productivity - people say the UI on BB is still not as great, so that counts for something - must at some point justify that developer's time.

If you have enough repos that you'd need to spend $200 a month on a platform that offers:

  - Wikis
  - Basic Issue Tracking
  - Source Control (and damn good source control at that)
  - Integration with many popular startup tools

Then maybe your startup should be out of business. I could shit $200 dollars and pay for my companies hosting.

Trying to skimp on this is like telling your 10+ dev team to use google talk for offline coordination. Yes, you save money on chat, but you lose all that time I waste copy-pasting and coordinating chats between multiple devs.

5 orders of magnitude will result in $1million/month.

Perhaps you misread the OP, but he mentioned megabyte not gigabyte. S3 costs $.125 per GB for the first TB, so the math would be: (.125/1024)(10101010*10) which comes out to $12.21, or pretty darn close.

Bitbucket's self-hosted enterprise product Stash is priced aggressively. It's free for open source projects, non-profits and classrooms. For small teams (up to 10 users), it costs just $10/year, all in, and you get the source code.

http://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/pricing

Contrast with Github where the minimum purchase is 1 seat pack (up to 20 users), costing $5000/year, and you don't get any access to the the source code.

https://enterprise.github.com/pricing

I use RhodeCode for a small team (https://bitbucket.org/marcinkuzminski/rhodecode).

It does not have all the features of github or bitbucket but is selfhosting and opensource.

I am really curious: Why does getting access to the source code matter?

(I am just asking since it seems to be a selling point, and I have never really modified the code of a tool that I have used. For example, how many people modify Eclipse, or Maven, or BugZilla's source code?)

Stash's internals are completely extensible. Having access to the source allows you to extend and modify it to fit your needs. On top of that, you can build features (i.e., plugins) on top of Stash that you can share or sell to other Stash users on Atlassian's Marketplace.

Stash allows you to customize your deployment... database, server platform and develop plugins.

Having the source is critical to develop tightly integrated plugins for customization.

You can fix bugs, customize the interface to your liking, stuff like this? It's basically another selling point, no? (Haven't tried it myself)

Just thinking out loud...maybe the customer would like to make a modification or two? Is it better to _not_ have the source code?

I regularly need the source code for Maven or its plugins to check where exactly a bug is that I am experiencing.

I think it's targeted to startups who want to do costs savings. As they'll probably retain them when they grow, the pricing goes 180 times more expensive for the next plan. It's still a lot cheaper than Github, though.

We recently moved to GitHub Enterprise and it really is not as expensive as it looks. It is $250/year per developer... not really that much considering what you get. Plus it is a virtual server provided for us, so we just have to upload software upgrade packages to get the latest updates. We didn't have to spend the money on someone to set up all of the MySql, Redis, Solr, etc. services to get it running. So honestly I consider GitHub Enterprise to be quite a cost savings. Just a counterpoint...

EDIT: We are not a startup, but still something to consider.

Oh, I just realized the $10 was for a year but not a month.

Google is working on a new Google Code overhaul which is supposed to be quite different.

Source?

Yep. That's pretty much the focus of google code.

Not yet it isn't. In the current UI, to get to the source code, you have to

1. Find the little "Source" link and click it.

2. Find the "Browse" link, which is in a little toolbar right under the other little toolbar, next to the (less relevant) "Changes" and "Clones" links, which look visually near-identical.

3. In most (but not all) projects, hunt down the word "trunk" in tiny 13px text, and click it to see the main development branch.

Compare to GitHub or BitBucket, which just show you the damn code.

(Yes, I know you were joking, but I've been wanting to rant about this UI failure for a while now. And don't even get me started on Launchpad.)

> but I've been wanting to rant about this UI failure for a while now. And don't even get me started on Launchpad.

After five years or whatever of being tricked into clicking Launchpad links, I just noticed the other day that they have a "source" link on the top left corner. I had no idea they actually displayed source code. I always thought it was some crappy bug reporting product. Who knew?

> I always thought it was some crappy bug reporting product.

Hah. Got you, it's also a crappy project-hosting product, a crappy code-hosting product, a crappy code review product and a crappy FQA/Q&A product. And an acceptable translation product (not as good as Transifex, but it's free, bit it requires using the rest of that crap).

I've always liked the bug-tracker. It's much more user-friendly than bugzilla IMO, and it handles bugs that affect multiple projects really well, even when the other projects use other bug trackers.

> It's much more user-friendly than bugzilla IMO

That's a pretty low bar to set though.

> and it handles bugs that affect multiple projects really well

Kind-of, changing the project set (outside of adding projects to an existing bug) might be impossible (same with in-project "series" — its code for branches), until fairly recently the role of some statuses was very unclear (and I'm still not entirely sure of their actual use), one of the links is essentially useless and — as everywhere else in launchpad — text formatting is completely non-existent (without even talking about richer data sets, such as adding screenshots to bug reports which falls under "add attachment or patch").

Multi-project and multi-branch tracking are nice, but they're limited and they don't make the tracker much friendlier.

I think he was asking for the source of @wahnfrieden's claim.

Hah. This reads like a geeky Airplane!/Flying High quote or something.

Yeah, I was. I would still like to know

/that's the joke.mcbain.jpg

GitHub nails the public code space, with social features.

Bitbucket nails the private project space; so for small dev companies they are perfect.

I've been a BB user from early on and they have successfully focused on this niche for some time now.

I'd say both are equally perfect options for their respective usage :-)

Since BitBucket is run by Atlassian, whose primary business (as far as I know) is enterprise software, I would guess (again without knowing) that they're in a pretty good position.

They're well known for their wiki, Confluence, and their ticket/issue/task tracker, JIRA. Source control is a natural extension of those tools, which I'd guess have had some effort put into making sure they work well together.

Looks like Stash is what they sell to enterprises, versus BitBucket which is hosted. Anyone know if these are completely separate products, or if they share a common codebase?

I've found SourceTree to be a great GUI tool for working on Git/Mercurial repos.

All of which is to say, good on them. I'm glad to see two very respectable players in this space.

> Looks like Stash is what they sell to enterprises, versus BitBucket which is hosted. Anyone know if these are completely separate products, or if they share a common codebase?

Two separate codebases. Bitbucket is running on a Python stack (Django) and Stash is built on a Java stack (traditional Atlassian stack). Stash can be extended through plugins (https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/app/stash/popular?...)

Just started using Confluence. If you're willing to use their hosted version, it's one of the best project management softwares I've used.

I would gladly use more products by them

Those free private repos are awesome and liberating - instead of bundling whole solutions into repos I'm just making them for anything now because the difference between a dozen repos and a few dozen is $0 a year instead of $600.

I really wish Google Code would support paid/private projects. Every startup I have been at would have been more productive with Google Code. Their bug tracker is better than both GitHub and BitBucket. We wouldn't have needed yet another set of accounts due to already being on Google. And critically they let you have multiple repositories for the same project. That is a huge annoyance with GitHub and BitBucket where you have exactly one repository (sometimes a second "wiki" one) and then one bug tracker, downloads etc. Every project I have worked on has multiple repositories (eg a server part, testing code, android client, admin tools, ios client). It has been of zero benefit having each one with its own bug tracker, downloads, wiki etc as often issues cross boundaries (eg bad display in client could be because of a bug in server returning bad data).

People have been begging Google to pay them! https://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=1829

Another option: Assembla provides Git, Subversion and Perforce repo hosting.

> (not counting places 1-10 for enterprise source control, which basically print money, and of which GitHub is chasing too).

What kind of source control do big corps use? Don't they just use SVN, with enormous budget for maintenance contracts?

Perforce and TFS (Team Foundation Server) are other choices that I've seen used in large corps.

(TFS obviously for Microsoft houses only.)

One thing: pricing.

* Free private repo for small teams

* Unlimited private repos for pay customers (price is per user)

Github's pricing with a limit in the repo number makes it pretty much impossible to use if you're in the service business and you start a new project quite often. It may be fine for the startup with one main project, I guess.

"but I think its going to be hard to win anymore" I guess history has showed us that as soon as something feels unbeatable, a contender comes out of nowhere to dethrone the king.

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