When choosing a source code repository service, you want to ensure that you find one that’s conducive to your goals and specific needs. It’s a big decision as it impacts how you host your code and your productivity besides being an important part of your work.
Most developers use Git as their version control system, but it can be challenging to find a place to host the source code.
Bitbucket is one of the most popular repository hosting options available. However, it’s primarily geared towards businesses that develop private, proprietary code.
Plus, its enterprise features lack a security dashboard and enterprise migration tools. The Bitbucket CI/CD is also cloud-only, and there’s no native support for canary deployments or for feature flags.
Here are the 15 best Bitbucket alternatives that you can use in your development workflow.
Best Bitbucket Alternatives
1. GitHub
GitHub is one of the most popular source code repositories that share some similarities with Bitbucket, and a few subtle differences that are worth considering.
Both are hosting platforms with private and public repositories for developers and operate in similar ways function-wise.
You can create and manage repositories, log in with two-factor authentication, make pull requests, conduct code reviews, perform issue tracking, and use inline editing or markdown support.
People rely on GitHub to build, discover, share and contribute to software from experiments and games to popular frameworks and leading apps. You can share code with anyone, and build amazing things together.
The platform offers the largest coding community compared to Bitbucket, with 100 million repositories and 40 million users worldwide. In fact, GitHub is deemed the largest host of source code in the world and the hub for Git version control.
Since 2004, GitHub has since been acquired by Microsoft in 2018, and its primary focus is on public code. The platform is written in Ruby and Erlang, and you can use its powerful features for all your development projects.
Some of its features include GitHub Pages, Gist, and support for more than 200 programming languages. The service also offers desktop clients for Windows and Mac, direct integration with popular apps, and support for Git and SVN (partial).
You can use GitHub for personal or business development projects, which you’re comfortable sharing with the public.
Bitbucket, on the other hand, is ideal mostly for enterprises or businesses that want to host their private, proprietary code safely.
Unlike GitHub alternatives, its interface isn’t overly complex, though it’s also not as stylish in its UI, and it has a wide range of features and utilities you can use.
Plus, GitHub has a Projects tab by default, which you won’t find in Bitbucket and it comes with a Kanban solution like Bitbucket’s Trello service. This way, each of your projects will have its own boards, which are sufficient for documentation and planning purposes.
Bitbucket may offer free branch permissions to grant users access to specific branches, but GitHub also enables this feature on public repositories for free.
2. GitLab
GitLab is another completely open source web interface and source control platform based on Git. The platform is delivered on a single app and changes how you collaborate and build software with your Development, Security, and Ops teams.
The platform helps teams in the idea to production stages to improve cycle time from weeks to just minutes. Plus, GitLab helps them reduce development process costs while reducing time to market and increasing developer productivity.
GitLab and Bitbucket differ in several ways. While Bitbucket supports Git or Mercurial, it doesn’t support SVN, and GitLab lacks support for Mercurial and SVN.
Plus, GitLab is a complete DevOps service with robust native security capabilities that Bitbucket doesn’t support. These capabilities include container and dependency scanning, license compliance, and secret detection among others.
GitLab also provides self-managed, on-prem, and cloud SaaS solutions, while running the exact code on its own platform that’s offered to self-hosted customers. This way, its customers can migrate from SaaS to self-hosted and vice versa easily while maintaining feature parity.
The platform also allows you to rapidly innovate using its transparent product development process, and your customers, community, or partners can all contribute.
Check out this interesting post comparing GitLab Vs Jira.
3. Azure DevOps Server
Azure DevOps Server is an enterprise-grade server from Microsoft that helps teams share code, track work, and ship software using integrated delivery tools. The platform is the perfect complement to your IDE or existing editor and works for any language in one package.
Plus, Azure DevOps Server is hosted on-premises and enables you to work effectively with your cross-functional team on projects of any size.
You also get developer services that support your team to plan work, collaborate on developing code, and building or deploying apps.
The platform also supports a culture and sets of processes that enable contributors, project managers, and developers to come together to complete software development. Organizations use it to create and improve products quicker than they would with traditional software development methods.
You can also use its integrated features to access through your IDE client or web browser or use one or more of the following services for your business:
Azure Repos, which offers Team Foundation Version Control or Git repositories for code source control.
Azure Pipelines, which offers build and release services that support continuous app delivery and integration.
Azure Boards, which offers a suite of Agile tools to support how you plan and track work, issues with Scrum and Kanban methods, and code defects.
Azure Test Plans, which offers tools for app testing, including continuous and manual/exploratory testing.
Azure Artifacts, which lets your team share packages from private or public sources and integrate the package sharing in your pipelines.
You can also use collaboration tools in Azure like customizable dashboards, built-in wikis (which you also get in Bitbucket), configurable notifications, and support for adding extensions or integrations.
Unlike Bitbucket, Azure DevOps Server supports integration with GitHub Enterprise Server. The platform is useful when you want quick set-up, maintenance-free operations, easy collaboration across domains, rock-solid security, and elastic scale.
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4. Helix Core
Helix Core is an enterprise-class versioning engine that allows you to collaborate on development projects faster with your team, regardless of its size.
The platform allows you to use any tools like Visual Studio or Git, and still enjoy blazing-fast workflows, all file type support, and faster builds from one source of truth.
Its clients rely on it to build and deliver complex digital projects much faster and with higher quality.
The industrial-strength version control and collaboration platform also support flexible workflows, while eliminating the complexity of distributed and large-scale product development. This way, you can build products much faster and still protect your valuable intellectual property.
Helix Core also delivers speed and productivity no matter the repository size or file type. It also scales and grows with you gracefully while offering teams a flexible version control approach.
Unlike Bitbucket, which stopped offering Mercurial assets, Helix Core offers Mercurial repositories making it easier for you to create and use them. It also tracks and manages changes to your digital assets like video, code, IPs, and large binary files among others.
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5. Assembla
Assembla is another secure project collaboration and version control platform that offers secure cloud hosting for Perforce, Subversion, and Git repositories.
The platform has integrated project management for over 5,500 clients worldwide, and its VCS helps development teams with their HIPAA, PCI, SOC2, and GDPR compliance standards.
You can use Assembla to meet compliance, stay innovative, and still manage your source code and projects from one dashboard with industry-leading security and compliance.
The solution is the only one in the world offering NextGen SVN, which Bitbucket lacks, Perforce cloud version control, and SecureGit repositories with project management.
The platform also provides an SVN platform with code search, locking, and merge requests from WebApp, Mobile, and Desktop within the SOC2 framework.
The security it offers includes advanced branch protection, IP whitelisting, and native scanning for secret/password keys.
Assembla helps you build software faster with less stress, and offers GitHub and Slack integration, task management, and Zapier integration, which you won’t find with Bitbucket.
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6. JFrog Artifactory
JFrog Artifactory is a universal repository that helps you control the flow of your binaries from the building to the production stage. It functions as the single source of truth for the packages, container images, and Hel charts in the JFrog platform as they move across the DevOps pipeline.
The benefits of using JFrog Artifactory are that it’s end-to-end from code to production, provides faster deployment, and proactive identification of vulnerabilities and license compliance violations.
JFrog also provides high availability so you can achieve zero downtime across your DevOps pipeline, and you can control the environment using native and ecosystem integrations.
Unlike Bitbucket, which is buggy and lacks Mercurial repositories, JFrog offers a universal repository meaning it’s less buggy and has a large active community.
The platform also offers hybrid and multi-cloud deployment options for enterprises that scale as your business grows.
With Bitbucket, you can plan all your projects and collaborate, test, and deploy with free private repositories. On the other hand, JFrog is an enterprise universal repository manager that integrates with your ecosystem and provides end-to-end support for all phases of your project.
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7. Buddy
Buddy is an effective way to build applications quickly. The platform combines impeccable user experience with excellent performance for teams who want to introduce CI/CD painlessly and speed up the software development lifecycle.
With Buddy, you can get your time back using its delivery pipelines, which eliminate mundane and repetitive tasks in your daily software development process. You can also build and ship web projects automatically on one git push, recurrently, or with one click.
Buddy allows you to code, build, and deploy with no effort, define your delivery process from builds, and tests deployments, web monitoring, and custom scripts. You can bring the newest technology to your team stack using containers, Kubernetes deployments, microservices, and more.
The platform has a quick 10–15-minute setup with effortless pipeline configuration in a user interface with predefined actions and the average deployment time is 12 seconds.
Smart change detection, state-of-the-art caching, parallelism, and all-around optimizations make Buddy the fastest.
Unlike Bitbucket, which is designed for enterprises and businesses, Buddy is built for any user, with simple installation on your own machine with one command, or into the cloud.
Buddy also integrates easily with popular apps like Docker, Google, AWS, Slack, or Kubernetes accounts, and it’s easy to learn with responsive engineer support and appealing documentation.
The user interface and dashboards in Buddy give you visibility of the state of your projects and deployments across multiple environments like development, staging, and production. It makes CI effortless even for the most novice of developers and you can get it set up and managed easily.
8. Amazon GameLift
Amazon GameLift is a dedicated and managed service that deploys, operates, and scales dedicated game servers for multiplayer games.
You can use it as a fully-managed solution or just pick the features you want and leverage AWS capabilities for the best latency, maximum cost savings, and low wait times.
The service delivers high reliability, performance, and low-cost servers while scaling your resource usage dynamically to meet player demand across the world.
With Amazon GameLift, you can use ready-to-go Realtime Servers or bring your own custom multiplayer game servers with little or no backend experience compared to Bitbucket, which can be a bit technical for novices.
You also get low-latency player experience for fast-action gameplay, reduced engineering, and operational effort to deploy and operate game servers worldwide.
Amazon GameLift helps you get started fast and pay as you go, with no long-term commitments and upfront costs.
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9. Phabricator
Phabricator is a complete toolset that helps you develop software, manage sprints and tasks, host git, review code, SVN, or mercurial repositories.
Unlike Bitbucket, Phabricator supports Mercurial and SVN repositories, and you can build with continuous integration while reviewing designs and discussing internal chat channels among other things.
The platform is scalable, fast, and fully open source unlike Bitbucket, which is built for businesses and enterprises and is only free to open source projects that meet certain criteria.
Phabricator allows you to review others’ code using Differential so you can look at it, leave comments and anecdotes, place bad code in the author’s queue, and challenge the test plan. The platform can host repositories locally, observe other repositories hosted elsewhere, and scale to multiple servers.
You can also audit source code using Herald to trigger audits and plan features, track bugs, and award tokens.
You can also fix bugs eventually, but this is optional, build unique task forms for each department, and assign task management to people.
Phabricator also provides a document wiki like Bitbucket, where you can write text, read it later, and make the text purple to resolve conflicts. An API is included that lets you write scripts that interact with Phabricator for app programming.
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10. Klocwork
Klocwork is a SAST and static code analysis tool that makes it easy for you to comply with coding standards.
The tool identifies quality, software, reliability, and security issues and can scale projects of any size. Plus, it keeps development velocity high while enforcing continuous security and quality compliance.
The key features include the ability to find security vulnerabilities and fix them early so you can prove compliance to internationally recognized security standards.
The tool also integrates containers, machine provisioning, cloud services, and CI/CD tools to make automated security testing easy.
Unlike Bitbucket, which is built for enterprises, Klocwork is built for enterprise DevOps and DevSecOps and scales to any size project while integrating with large complex environments.
Klockwork is DevOps ready and its tools are designed with continuous integration and delivery making it easy to include static code analysis in your pipelines.
You can also control collaboration and reporting with the portal dashboard, which stores trends, data, metrics, and configurations for codebases.
11. LibGDX
LibGDX is a development framework that works on all platforms like Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and your browser. The platform offers a robust environment from which you can create prototypes quickly with fast iterations.
Unlike Bitbucket, libGDX is fully open source and licensed under Apache 2.0 but maintained by an active community. The feature-rich platform is well-proven and reliable as a framework, with sound documentation and base.
You can access its active community and get welcoming developers of games and apps to work with, or take a look at libGDX’s extensive third-party ecosystem.
A single API is included that targets major operating systems, and you can use backends to access the host platform’s capabilities without writing platform-specific code.
12. Gitea
Gitea is a lightweight, painless, community-managed, and self-hosted solution and Git service that’s written in Go. The service is similar to Bitbucket and other hosting repositories that are published under the MIT license.
The main goal of the project is to give users an easy, fast, and painless way to set up a self-hosted Git service. Like Bitbucket, it supports major operating systems including Windows, macOS, and Linux on architectures like PowerPC, ARM, i386, and others.
However, Gitea is open source, while Bitbucket is free for certain projects that meet specific criteria. Plus, it runs anywhere Go can compile, is easy to install, and has low minimal requirements unlike other repositories like it.
13. Plastic SCM
Plastic SCM helps you solve problems, develop new features, merge in time, and go distributed without breaking a build.
The platform solves problems silently and efficiently and is excellent with handling huge projects or big binary assets natively, or branch and merge functions. Plus, it comes with tools or user interfaces that ease everything.
Plastic SCM positions itself against Bitbucket by working in a versatile way – centralized or distributed, provides an easy-to-understand visual interface, and handles big binaries neatly.
You can automate merge functionality so as to build a modern-day DevOps pipeline, and assess diffs or merges visually with the relevant functionality.
14. Collaborator
Collaborator is a premier tool designed for teams that work on projects where the quality of code is critical to the process.
The team peer code and document review tool bridges the gap between teams that handle development, testing, and management as they collaborate in one platform to review everything.
Unlike Bitbucket, which is a code hosting site for Git, Collaborator is the industry-first code review tool that’s also used for Git and code collaboration.
Teams can conduct peer reviews to include user stories, project requirements and design documents to source code, and test plans so as to increase code quality. You can see everything including code changes and identify defects or comment on specific lines.
You can also set review rules and participant notifications, build custom review templates to tailor processes to your needs, set fields, checklists, and participant groups for different peer reviews.
15. Beanstalk
Beanstalk is a complete workflow upon which developers can write, review, and deploy code. The hassle-free hosted version control service is built for startups and freelancers with features like access records and IP restrictions for security, priority support, and scalable deployments.
Unlike Bitbucket, which works for businesses and enterprises, Beanstalk works for any size or kind of business and also supports SVN and Git.
You also get 100 percent uptime SLA and full control of individuals and teams using repository and branch level permissions. You can also collaborate with your team so they’re always in the know.
Wrapping Up
Picking the right platform to host your source code can be tricky.
With these Bitbucket alternatives, you have a great place to start and some of them are open source so you won’t even have to pay extra costs to access similar features or services.
