Gitlab vs Github vs Bitbucket – What’s the Difference?. Are you excited to know the differences between the most widely used repositories? Then you are at the right place. This Gitlab vs Github vs Bitbucket post explains the major advantages and disadvantages (pros and cons) of these web based repositories. This post is helpful for those who are from non programming backgrounds, and Non IT people. Let’s begin:
What is Gitlab?
Gitlab is an open core service company, that allows developers to access the Git repositories. Here we would like to explain the term “Git”, where Git represents the source code version that keeps track of code modification, push or pull repositories from the remote resources. Gitlab is a self hosted web based Git repository management system that helps developers to keep their code private and easy to customize the code even after deployment.
Gitlab was developed by Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov in 2011. Gitlab is the most prominent way to manage git repositories on multiple numbers of centralized servers. Gitlab allows developers to have complete over their repositories when it comes to hosting the software projects (private/public/ or free).
Key features of Gitlab
- Gitlab helps developers to host their software projects for free.
- Gitlab is a popular domain where you can manage the various Git repositories.
- Gitlab provides features like hosting software projects for free/ private/public, issue tracking, and maintaining the wiki pages.
- Gitlab is a user friendly and web user interface that increases the speed of working on this platform.
- Gitlab offers its own set of continuous integration (CI) for managing the software projects and provides a user interface within the repositories.
Pros of Gitlab
- Gitlab. Inc offers a free edited version of the Git community.
- It allows users to locate their own code on the servers.
- Gitlab offers unlimited numbers of both public and private repositories for free.
- Even the Snippet feature of Gitlab helps to share a small amount of code instead of sharing the whole project’s code.
- Seamless integration is possible with Gitlab.
- Gitlab offers detailed viewing and documentation of the software projects.
Cons of Gitlab
- Less speedy when compared to Github while pulling or pushing the software codes.
- Gitlab user interfaces take a lot of time while switching from one page to another.
- Gitlab’s license is still on the roadmap and does not support the Google cloud applications.
- Not a very popular platform and the launchpad is quite new when compared to other host platforms.
What is Github?
Github is one of the largest and popular web hosting platforms. Github is the best platform to collaborate and communicate with developers. This platform comes up with useful features that enable software development teams to work together on the same project, and they can easily create any newer version of the software without disturbing the current version. We know that Git is a command line tool whereas Github is a web based graphical user interface that works on the top of the “Git” tool. Github can also be treated as a social platform where developers can share their knowledge and work with the outer world. With the help of Github, it’s very easy to track the issues, build the codes, test the codes, and finally deploy them.
Github was first founded by TomPreston, Chris Wansrath, P.J Hyett, and Scott Chacon in 2008. Github is the world’s largest software project development platform as it offers cloud storage to source code development, supports all kinds of programming languages, and iteration processes.
Key features of Github
- Wikis: Github wikis are simple that allows other developers to contribute or share their content or work. With the help of Wikis, any Github user can create and edit the documentation page, examples, and support pages.
- Restrict editing of pages in teams with push access only permission: This is nothing but public access permission, this type of access allows any type of user to develop the codes.
- Issue tracking: This feature allows issues to integrate the lightweight task into the repository. Helps to keep projects on track with issue labels and milestones. Finally, reference them in the commit message.
- Project boards: The project boards on Github helps users to organize and prioritize the development work. In Github, users can able to create their own project boards for specific tasks, provides comprehensive roadmaps, and help to release the checklists.
Pros of Github
- Performs high level operations: Github is a widely used repository platform by developers because its significant features enable users to perform high level operations. Along with this advantage, it also supports designing the operations, User experience backups, recovery, reporting issues, and admin portal.
- Popularity: The latest report suggests that more than 50+ million users access the Github repository. This shows how popular the domain is.
- Multi geography mirroring: This is an added advantage because the Github repository supports the “spokes” technology.
- Integration: offers a high level of code or data integration with any other tools.
- Upgrade: Github community version offers minimal downtime for the upgrade.
Cons of Github
- Although Github is a prominent collaborating tool in the meantime it is at a risk for any malicious activity.
- One of the major disadvantages of Github is if any external developer tries to access the source code, then there might be a great chance of holding control of that version of Athena. Then it’s impossible to review the code when external users start making it local copies.
- Github is a public repository platform so anyone with a Github account can access the source codes.
- If you want to access the versioning repository you need to subscribe to the Github.com premium account.
- Github repository does not offer the proper testing services.
- Sometimes lacks Windows operating support.
- With Github, it’s impossible to track the empty folders.
- Github repository does not support binary files access.
What is Bitbucket?
Bitbucket is a Git based web hosting repository that was first developed by the Atlassian company. Bitbucket offers free account subscriptions as well as commercial plans. The main functions of Bitbucket include are managing source code repositories, collaborating with teams, and completing a guide to code development workflow. It also supports the software development life cycle process, and there are various Bitbucket tools available they are; Bitbucket cloud manager, Bitbucket data center, and Bitbucket Server.
Key features of Bitbucket
- Bitbucket helps to pull the requests with code review and comments given by the users or developers.
- Bitbucket consists of pipelines and offers a continuous delivery service.
- User login into the Bitbucket requires a two step verification process.
- Bitbucket offers IP (internet port) whitelisting.
- Merge checks are also available.
- Bitbucket provides a code check analysis feature.
- It also provides a larger data storage capacity to store Git files.
- Documentation is also possible that includes automatically rendered README files in a Markdown file format.
- Issue tracking is also possible with Bitbucket.
- Bitbucket enables users to the creation of Wikis.
- Add on and integration features are also available with Bitbucket.
- Bitbucket helps REST APIs to build third party web applications which are used by any programming language.
- The snippet feature in BitBucket allows developers to share the code files or segments with external users.
- Offers smart mirroring features.
Pros of Bitbucket
- Bitbucket is a more flexible platform than Github: Bitbucket comes up with a few built in features, they allow users to create their own workflow. Whereas Github also consists of valuable features but when compared with Bitbucket in terms of flexibility, Bitbucket stands first.
- Bitbucket allows users to import their source code files from various sources such as Git, Google Code, Source Forge, Code Plex, and SVN.
- Bitbucket has better pricing than Github or Gitlab: Bitbucket subscription is free for up to 5 users. This subscription offers benefits like unlimited private repository usage, and in a few cases, you can access the public repository it depends on the file size and source code. Bitbucket upgrade price is 3$ a month per user with unlimited repository access (both private and public repositories) and also large data storage capacity. Whereas Github upgrade subscription charge is $21/ month/per user and a quite a bit expensive when compared to Bitbucket.
- Bitbucket is a trustworthy platform: Most of the engineers prefer to use the Github platform because of its immense advantages and its popularity over the years. But Bitbucket is also a user friendly repository and offers easy to use features.
- Bitbucket offers semantic search option: As we know that little things always matter like that Bitbucket offers semantic search to query the data, Crawl the syntax to find the definition rather than just giving the variable names.
- Bitbucket has powerful JIRA integration benefits: Bitbucket is a product of Atlassian company, JIRA is also an Atlassian product. But JIRA has a feature of bug tracking, issue tracking. Bitbucket integrates with the JIRA tool if you wish to use both the tools together, you need to set the code commit option to update the issues on JIRA automatically.
Cons of Bitbucket
- Issue tracking: Looks like the Bitbucket platform does not build to handle issue tracking while software project development.
- Lack of third party support: You can see there are a lot of third party vendors who are unable to integrate with Bitbucket even if they offer the Github kind of integration. This is one of the biggest drawbacks of the Bitbucket.
- The configuration seems not easy sometimes like with other tools.
- Bitbucket creates the pipeline within the applications.
Gitlab vs Github vs Bitbucket - Final Words
If you are a software developer then it’s mandatory to have a piece of knowledge on all the repository tools like Gitlab, Github, and Bitbucket, etc. This Post Gitlab VS Github VS Bitbucket is designed to help software development communities to know the available features, pros, and cons with respect to the tools. Github is a more popular and widely used tool among others.
