Developers are religious. Whether it is vi vs emacs, or IDEA vs Eclipse or Mac vs Linux. In September we had a huge debate internally (hundreds of comments long) on functional vs non-functional programming.
We know that no-one wins in these religious debates.
We've found that developers are equally religious regarding their DVCS. Most frequently it is whatever DVCS you started with is the one that you're passionate about.
We've found that most companies of any size have both Git and Mercurial lurking somewhere in their development ranks. Previously if they wanted to host their code in the cloud (and who wouldn't), they would have had to choose two different hosting providers. As a developer, this was a pain as you never knew where your code was.
Now that Bitbucket supports both, you no longer have to choose. We think this is a huge win! Companies can store all their code in one place. And with the per-user pricing, it is a very fair pricing model (don't have to think about whether a fork is going to cost you or not!).
If we had to re-make the decision of what remote DVCS host to use, I'd certainly look strongly at bitbucket. We have only a small handful of developers, but many repositories (60+) all getting low traffic.
We've used both Github and Beanstalkapp.com and both charge based on total repos rather then disk space or developers which, frankly, drives me a bit insane. I think both have better features then bitbucket (as far as I am aware) and better UI's (subjective) but my 60 small repos run me $100/month at beanstalk - not sure what it would run @ github.
I can't find any disk usage limits @ BB's site, which makes me wonder if there are hidden caps. If BB ever struck me as being as slick as github, I'd move our business in a second, even if the cost was higher then it is now ($10 a month? Really?!).
Just as a FYI - we don't have any disk limits (apart from fair use).
We don't want our pricing to be based on repos, or disk space, or any other limitation that is hard to predict, or encourages sub-optimal decision making to optimise cost. We think that users is the best way to price a product, and is easy to predict.
In terms of UI - there are things that bug me today, but our team is cranking along improving it.
But we have found that most of our users spend their time interacting via the command-line, and therefore we have prioritised features around stability and performance, as well as enabling Git support. Now that this is done, we'll be focusing more time on UI again.
Just as a FYI - we don't have any disk limits (apart from fair use).
Let me ask you about a particular case then :). I am in a group that develops a natural language parser for Dutch. It's open source, but so far we have been hosting it in a private Subversion repository on our university servers. We do provide a read-only (somewhat hidden) git mirror of the tree, but we have considered publishing it as an public git repository, but were always worried that the repository is too large for hosting it externally.
The git repository has existed for one and a half year, and the bare repo is currently 1098 MB in size*. Would hosting such a repository on Bitbucket be considered fair-use?
It's fine. However, we would recommend pushing and pulling over SSH for speed.
And let me clarify: by fair-use we mean we offer unlimited _code_ hosting, not general storage. We monitor for abuse, such as large repos containing only music, videos, and public viruses or malware. Though don't worry - if we notice any problems we'd of course contact you first.
My company is currently debating between Github and Bitbucket. And the funny thing is git vs hg wasn't really an issue. We've decided that either is so much better than svn that we'd take either.
We have 2 large road blocks for Bitbucket. First is a real nice review system with inline comments during a pull request. Is this coming soon? It's an absolute deal breaker for us.
Also the performance/usability seems to be lacking compared to Github. I hope that changes. Although we also use JiraStudio and it's performance is dreadful. And the usability is quite frustrating. So the Atlassian track record is a little worrying for us.
I really appreciate the feedback. Whilst I can't comment on future releases, I want to assure you that we are aware of the items you mention. Stay tuned :)
Yeah, I'm a happy developer that uses both bitbucket and github - I'd just wish that ui for bb gets nicer and more friendly - and it will be perfect tool for me.
Developers are religious. Whether it is vi vs emacs, or IDEA vs Eclipse or Mac vs Linux. In September we had a huge debate internally (hundreds of comments long) on functional vs non-functional programming.
We know that no-one wins in these religious debates.
We've found that developers are equally religious regarding their DVCS. Most frequently it is whatever DVCS you started with is the one that you're passionate about.
We've found that most companies of any size have both Git and Mercurial lurking somewhere in their development ranks. Previously if they wanted to host their code in the cloud (and who wouldn't), they would have had to choose two different hosting providers. As a developer, this was a pain as you never knew where your code was.
Now that Bitbucket supports both, you no longer have to choose. We think this is a huge win! Companies can store all their code in one place. And with the per-user pricing, it is a very fair pricing model (don't have to think about whether a fork is going to cost you or not!).