Bitbucket - The Enterprise alternative to GitHub

I have used Bitbucket in multiple scenarios. But mostly for Software Development with Scrum Board. Although I have used KANABN as well. I have experience both as project administrator and as regular user.

Pros

Bitbucket is private repository with lots of feature and multiple language support. In my daily use, I mostly commit Java applications using the scrum board. I have used the cloud version for almost three years. In my previous company and now at my current one. One of the best features is the code review following the git flow workflow. You can select the source and target branch for the pull request and you can select default approvers as well as define your own one.

Cons

The project administration, especially the setup of the permissions for a particular repository tends to be quite hard. And when you try to contact support, usually there is no help at all and you end up researching on forums to be able to find the answer you're looking for. In this kind of software, especially if a company like Attlassian is behind it, the support should be better.

Great tool, automation docs could be better

Once you get the hang of Bitbucket, it is easy to use and a very good visualizing tool for what you are doing with your repositories.

Pros

Bitbucket has a good UI and is very good for most of the repository related tasks. It has JIRA integration, so if you put your JIRA ticket numbers in the commit message, Bitbucket will link the pull requests into JIRA. This makes it very easy to access commits and the associated JIRA tickets from bitbucket itself, and vice versa. It has good branch visualization tools. It lets you select branches from a drop down and compare them with other source barnches. The diff visualizer is pretty good too. It even has good graphical icons to show which branches have been merged/rebased where. You can use command line git to manage repos as well. With their REST APIs it is possible to create repositories from the command line, which is very useful in cases where you have to do the tedious task of creating hundreds of repositories very similar to one another.

Cons

I was unable to find documentation on their APIs to set group and permissions access restrictions from the command line. This was required because we needed to create 100s of repos and allow our users to access them. Because we could not find API documentation easily and were in a time crunch, we had to have developers spend several days manually granting permissions using the web-console. Bitbucket should have these APIs clearly visible and documented.

Started as a great product, but I got disappointed

Brilliant from 7 years go until approx 3 years ago. Painful to use for the last 3 years and we are currently migrating everything to GitHub.

Pros

We started implementing version control using Mercurial about 7 years ago (in my own company). On the advice of a colleague at the time we used Mercurial as opposed to Git. Bitbucket worked perfectly with Mercurial when we needed it at the time and really helped our business. It was fast easy to use and understand and the online UI kept getting better and better.

Cons

In the last 3 years, pushing and pulling and doing any kind of actions became tediously slow. I copied some of the repos to GitHub and converted to Git to check it was not a problem with my repo, with my computer, or with the software I was using (SourceTree). In all cases the only difference was using a Mercurial versus Git repo on BitBucket. I got no response to my support query, and no response to a forum post as to the issue and when it would be fixed. I then made a decision for our entire company to move all of it's repos to GitHub and stop using BitBucket - we are doing this right now. Approx 1 year after the decision was made, BitBucket emailed all it's customers to say they would be discontinuing support for Mercurial as not enough of their customer base used it. However there was no suggestion of helping migrate all repos to Git, no support docs on how to do this and honestly this was too little too late for us. We had become so annoyed with BitBucket that we would have migrated regardless.

Easy to use, great product!

Overall, it is great. Also very suitable for business use due to its reasonable pricing schema and the performance of the product itself.

Pros

Overall very good product. All features of GIT are nicely implemented, haven't had much issues with it. Also, the pricing is based on users, not based on repository count like Github. So the prices are very fair, especially when you have a lot of repositories (for web design agencies like us).

Cons

One thing I'm not too happy about is its inability to reopen a declined Pull Request. I do not see any reason it cannot do that. An issue was raised and discussed (Bitbucket Issue #4954), and was not resolved. Another thing I didn't like was that there was once Bitbucket was hacked, and one of our repositories (lucky it wasn't a very important one) was hacked and I had to speak with a Bitbucket rep to restore our data. Took a day or two on that.

A good free alternative to github

I've been using it now for 6 years and it's my main repo host for work. I can recall only two times where there was a downtime that affected me, but besides that, there's never been a problem with them.

Pros

I like how robust their website is on terms of pull requests and integrations with JIRA and other atlassian products. You can store private repo's and manage it. The pull Request feature is the strongest in my opinion, with reviews and linking to JIRA. So it automatically can close tickets once you merge/accept a pull request. If you link the commits with a JIRA issue it also updates with them. They recently simplified the UI and their own home made SourceTree Visual App has received some substantial upgrades over the years and it's one of the best tree-based git history apps out there. In all honesty, it's a simple git control hosting website you can use online or host by yourself. It's really good.

Cons

The UI used to change a lot but now they've settled. Sometimes, compared to github, processing big pull requests (loading the changes/previewing) can be a little slow. Sometimes the integrations with JIRA, can feel like a miss if you don't use it, because Github has a lot of those features that Github might miss.