Azure Repos vs Bitbucket vs. GitHub vs. GitLab Comparison

It contains all of the tools that developers need to take control of every stage of the software development process. GitLab makes it easy for teams to create checklists that they can follow when they begin to write the code and do other tasks that are critical to the success of their project. GitLab also enables organizations to automate the shipping of software code to those servers that they need to get to without requiring human intervention.

You’ll find that many open-source projects will have a GitHub repository. For developer teams working on an open-source project, a GitHub repository is a good way to make the project as accessible as possible to the open-source community. Empower developers to fix vulnerabilities in minutes with the only community-driven, native application security testing solution on a platform designed for dynamic teams and regulated industries. We chose GitHub for version control hosting because of its high-quality and performant pull request user interface, as well as GitHub Actions.

With GitHub Enterprise, you also plug in to the largest development community in the world, and can collaborate directly on the open source projects that are probably already part of your stack. You can also access the latest and greatest in development tools such as GitHub Codespaces, GitHub Co-Pilot, and much much more, with great new features being shipped every day. All three of these services also offers a self-hosted option – typically for enterprise customers or users with special security requirements. Gitlab offers a most starred list, search feature, and free static site hosting, but they do not offer quite as many features for user profiles.

What’s GitHub?

That being said, it’s priced at $21 per user, per month so if you cannot afford that, I say go with Github. GitHub is the biggest code repository, used both by organizations for private access and open-source collaboration. The platform is so popular that people often think it’s synonymous with Git itself – hence, the Git versus GitHub doubts emerge. According to Statista, GitHub hosts leading open-source tools, including Flutter, Microsoft’s VS Code and Azure Docs, Facebook’s React Native, Tensor Flow, Kubernetes, and others. Even though the tool’s popularity doesn’t matter that much in the development process itself, it’s best to motivate your developers to learn trending instruments. It’s going to be easier to recruit candidates who have experience working with the service, introduce new practices, and drive transformation in the organization.

When deployed as a single tool, Bitbucket is a feature-rich code repository that supports many characteristics of the DevOps lifecycle. When combined with other Atlassian tools like Jira and Confluence, it quickly becomes a full-fledged DevOps platform. BitBucket offers a very limited free option, with pricing from $15/mo for 1 user. What you pay depends on the number of people who need access, so a team of 15 would only pay $45/mo on the Standard plan or $60 on the Premium. GitHub Actions does not offer some of the features users have with Azure Pipelines.

Originally supporting both distributed and centralized version control architectures, in recent years Bitbucket has dropped support for any centralized version control option to focus solely on Git. While the other platforms do offer DevOps tools, this is what GitLab is known for. More specifically, they pride themselves in providing DevSecOps functionality (integrating security into the software development lifecycle). It’s designed as a code repository, but only for Jira and Confluence integrations and software projects. GitHub is the most popular, with an active community of 100 million developers. It hosts 372 million repositories and is a favorite for open-source projects, with 28 million public repositories.

According to search trends, the service’s popularity nowadays is lower than GitHub’s or GitLab’s. Jira’s popularity is constantly growing, and this trend is driving new users to BitBucket as well. BitBucket is used by Slack, Accenture, Figma, Paypal, and other companies. Typical clients of gitlab vs github vs bitbucket vs azure devops the platform are active users of the Atlassian ecosystem – not open-source contributors. GitHub offers a lot of add-ons for increasing development productivity and improving collaboration. Arguably, BitBucket comes even further in this direction, while GitLab simply offers more options.

Azure DevOps Projects vs. Bitbucket vs. GitHub vs. GitLab Comparison Chart

You can find GitHub’s documentation at docs.github.com, which offers a centralized place to find the latest information about GitHub’s products, how to use them, and how to get help. This documentation is kept up-to-date by our documentation teams partnering closely with engineering, our product teams, and our outside community via community contributions. Finally, Bitbucket has the option to create public repositories, but they do not currently offer a search feature.

The majority of popular version-control tools rely on Git – a system for distributed version control. The aim is to help teams track changes and improve collaboration among developers. Git’s creation aim is to facilitate cooperation and provide open-source communities with tools. Files tend to get thicker with time as versions get merged and verified.

A lot of them will be recurring – to make a comparison more evident, we’ll specifically highlight all the unique points. Still, we believe that an educated comparison requires a full overview of functionality – so you understand what to work with. Recently, teams have been actively switching to GitLab from other services. Particularly due to GitLab’s seamless support of CI pipeline and Docker (and the use of those has grown tremendously lately). If your organization is unable to afford a particular platform, that platform will be out of the selection process, no matter its features.

Best 19 CI/CD Tools to Watch out in 2023

The top reviewer of GitLab writes «Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage». On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Azure DevOps writes «High level protection, scales well, but more customer feedback updates needed». We also don’t like the «everything in one tool» approach from GitHub as there are better tools for build system, package registries, etc. on the market. I am using it myself, use the free community edition, it also comes with a lot of great tools. According to Google Trends, the popularity of GitHub has been fairly consistent over the last two years.

At their core, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps are comparable when it comes to core version controlling functionality. Their true differentiating factors are the additional features and integrations offered by each platform that aid in the software development life cycle. These extra features will become even more valuable with most organizations moving to DevOps methods. Bitbucket does not have project management built into the baseline product. That said, it has best-in-class integrations with both Jira and Trello, both of which are owned by its parent company Atlassian.

BitBucket offers a free version up to five users with a relatively cheap premium option compared to other platforms. As a product managed by Atlassian, BitBucket shines when interacting with other popular Atlassian products such as Jira, Confluence, Trello, Opsgenie, etc. This makes Bitbucket the go-to choice if the organization relies on other Atlassian products.

Azure Repos vs. Bitbucket vs. GitHub vs. GitLab Comparison Chart

If you want to learn more about Pipelines and Actions, Microsoft has published a comparison of the two tools on its website. With Git, the entire codebase and history of a project will be available on every developer’s https://traderoom.info/ computer, which is why branching and merging with Git is so easy. GitLab is ranked 3rd in Release Automation with 48 reviews while Microsoft Azure DevOps is ranked 1st in Release Automation with 57 reviews.

• The top reviewer of GitLab writes «Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage».
• CI/CD pipelines can get quite sophisticated in GitLab, with its built-in support for multiple operating systems, multiple development languages, a private docker registry and even pipelines as code.
• GitLab also enables organizations to automate the shipping of software code to those servers that they need to get to without requiring human intervention.
• What you pay depends on the number of people who need access, so a team of 15 would only pay $45/mo on the Standard plan or $60 on the Premium.
• If your projects are primarily engineering driven, GitLab is a great choice.

The major functionality of GitHub is repository branching and forking, pull and merge requests, codebase cloning. The main functionality works quickly – perhaps, the fastest among the three. Developers can quickly upload files to remote repositories and receive immediate notifications from other contributors. In this post, we will discuss how to go about selecting a git-based version control platform and the current leading version control platforms.

A service that stores projects to enable access to several computers and developers is called a project hosting service. All serious development and scientific projects rely on these platforms – they allow keeping track of the team’s work and accessing code from any device. Microsoft purchased GitHub in 2018, and now it is under the Microsoft services umbrella with the full backing of Microsoft.

Even if you can’t find an answer, GitHub provides support, and there are millions of other devs you can ask on the platform. Chances are, there’s a wiki, forum, tutorials, or solution to your problem on the platform—or a link to an answer on Reddit. In this post, we compare GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket—and help you choose the tool that best fits your requirements. From the hottest programming languages to commentary on the Linux OS, get the developer and open source news and tips you need to know. Complete control over identity provisioning, access and removal of permissions with Enterprise Managed Users in the cloud. Over 17,000 GitHub Actions are available in the GitHub Marketplace to automate your development workflow.

The main distinction of this platform is its integration with Jira and Asana. Ever since Atlassian acquired BitBucket, it has become a native component of their ecosystem. GitHub is a fully online platform without any option to run a self-hosted coming under the enterprise tier. It exclusively supports Git and offers a feature set that spans collaborative coding, automation, and CI/CD to project management. Let’s take a look at the differences between Github, Bitbucket, and Gitlab in this area.

It would be useful to explain in a bit more detail the integration to Jira you would like to achieve. Some of the Jira plugins will work with any git repository, regardless if its github/bitbucket/gitlab. Bitbucket is owned by Atlassian so if you use Jira or Bamboo you may appreciate Bitbucket’s built-in integrations.

If your projects are primarily engineering driven, GitLab is a great choice. The all-in-one approach will improve efficiency for your development and test teams. Also, because GitLab is open source, it far outpaces competitors when it comes to the addition of new features.

For example, you cannot follow users on Gitlab like you can on Github. Generally, developers agree that GitLab and GitHub have the best interface. Many developers prefer GitHub because it’s more popular and they are used to the navigation. However, teams using Jira benefit from having seamless integrations with the Atlassian ecosystem – so BitBucket is a natural choice. The free version of GitHub allows developers to work with public and private repositories, contribute to them, and collaborate.