Are there that many non-enterprise companies using Bitbucket over Github? Most startups and mid-sized companies I know use Github for private repo hosting.
I think the integration with JIRA (which is arguably best-in-breed for moderately heavy-duty issue tracking) is quite a compelling argument for going with an all-Atlassian setup; you can even use their SourceTree product as a git GUI.
On the other hand, GitHub's stuff generally does feel nicer to use and better and more thoughtfully UX'd.
Side note, but you can use SourceTree regardless, right?
I assume it has some features that are paid (or only work with Bitbucket?), but I've found it brilliant for managing GH repos - one of the nicest free tools I use.
Nope, SourceTree is now 100% gratis. You still have to "register" it and apply a key after 30 days, but this involves a simple signup form on a website.
Bitbucket provides free private repos, and for smaller development teams and/or companies not wanting to deal with the cost of Github (which does admittedly grow exponentially the more repos you require), Bitbucket is a fine choice.
When we were making the decision at my company, we went with Github because the dev team cared about having the little green squares show up on the "activity" chart for their account's... I know, petty, but it's something, and since most of us do FOSS projects, it's a status thing.
It used to be any commit that made it into a repo's master branch, the green squares showed up, even if it was a private repo (it just didn't show details of the repo to public users). But now, those don't show up to the public, only the user themselves sees them while logged in... so if we were making the decision today, I'd probably lean towards Bitbucket.
For a team, pricing is different. 50 repos is $100 a month, 125 repos is $200 a month ($2,400 a year). Granted, it's not "exponential", I was using a figure-of-speech referring to the pricing becoming significant.
For an internal-dev team which generates a great deal of new repos throughout the year (one-off scripts/programs for different departments, etc...), this adds up very quickly.
If you reach that 126th repo, it jumps to $450 monthly or $5,400 a year. At those prices you get questions from Accounting about why we aren't hosting this internally...
GitHub Enterprise is an appliance VM you run internally. It's charged per seat. The last enterprise-y company I was at used it primarily because you keep your code inside the firewall, but also because the pricing model is more aligned with the usage in that environment, as you suggest.
GitHub Enterprise is even more expensive than what I quoted above. The quotes above are for private "team" repos under an "Organization" on Github (they host it all).
It can depend highly on your needs. We have a small team but a large number of private repositories. Github basis prices on number of repositories, which makes them incredibly expensive for us. Bitbucket basis prices on team size, which made them cheap for us.
We use BitBucket since we're a small shop from a developer count standpoint but we have a ton of small repos plus we migrated over a ton of legacy svn repos. GitHub gets expensive real quick when you are in that situation.
For anyone doing 'client work' rather than developing a single/few products, GitHub's pricing is almost prohibitively expensive.
We have a little over a hundred repositories. This puts is in the $200/mo plan for GitHub (125 repository limit).
Atlassian prices per-user. Our small three person dev team costs us nothing. We'll reach the next pricing tier when we hit our 6th developer, at which point it will cost us $10/mo and will remain that cost up to 10 developers.
BitBucket's top plan is $200/mo. That gets you unlimited repositories and users compared to GitHub's 125 repositories.
In the middle tier, GitHub charges $50/mo for 20 repositories whereas BitBucket charges $50/mo for 50 users.
If you have few repositories but many users, GitHub's pricing is advantageous. If you have many repositories but few users, BitBucket makes way more sense.
Tons of startups that you don't even know about use Bitbucket for their free private repos. When you have a team of 1-5 people there is no reason to pay for Github.
You'd think more start-ups/mid-size ones would use Bitbucket since they have free private repos. I'm guessing the social allure of Github and its superior repo/pull request UI is what trumps Bitbucket to that end.
I'm pretty sure it's wanting to be one of the 'cool kids' that pulls people to GitHub.
If your decision about where to host your code repos is decided by how pretty the webpage to create pull-requests is, the wrong people are making decisions such in your business.
The differences aren't as superficial as you suggest, in my experience. GitHub is just far more polished. Take commit history as an example: bitbucket makes it uncommonly awkward to step through a series of commit diffs for a given file, whilst github makes it a bit easier (although still not perfect - am I the only one who wants this feature?). Nicer looking doesn't always mean more usable, but there's often a correlation and, in this case, it definitely bears out.
Having said all that, I'm currently using bitbucket for a private work repo because I'm cheap :)
Unsurprisingly, this is very much a personal choice. I vastly prefer BitBucket's issue tracker. I love their side-by-side diff (somewhat recently added to GitHub). I love that they don't try to force this 72 char commit message on me and seem to handle it rather nicely via hover text. And I very much liked that they didn't support emoji and inline GIFs (since implemented, lamentably).
The more GitHub seems to adjust itself, the less I enjoy it. The more BitBucket seems to try to copy GitHub, the less I enjoy it. At the end of the day, I probably want GitHub circa 2008. I find when they really became opinionated about things to be the inflection point about whether they pushed things that were truly more usable.
That's not to say your view of things is wrong for you. But I don't think it's clear that "in this case, it definitely bears out".
> bitbucket makes it uncommonly awkward to step through a series of commit diffs for a given file, whilst github makes it a bit easier (although still not perfect - am I the only one who wants this feature?)
I want it too :) A time-machine style forward & back, showing changes to a file.
