Bitbucket alternatives and competitors

Our customer has hundreds and thousands of applications, and 12 are part of my current project. Three of those applications are using GitHub as a code repository. The rest use Bitbucket. This customer is an Atlassian shop, so only I don't think more than 50 people use it.

Any code they develop will be version-controlled in this GitHub tool, and they use the branching and merging strategy to promote their code. We use it for version control and parallel development.  

The code in GitHub will be consumed by CI/CD pipeline for the build and deployment. We're using the latest version, which has a feature called GitHub Actions that enables CI/CD within GitHub, but this organization doesn't use GitHub Actions. They prefer Bamboo. 

The most valuable aspects of GitHub are version control and parallel development. I also appreciate the forking part, which allows us to release a specific set of features to the environment. 

Development teams can integrate this tool with their IDEs. GitHub provides command line instructions that should suffice. But customers wonder how to configure their IDE because you have to clone the repo, register the username with a password, and then switch. All those things need to be performed within the IDE. So I don't know whether those things are already available. That would enable the developer to integrate their IDEs with the GitHub repository.

The development team pushes the code into a repository, and the CI/CD pipeline will perform the build. We need open-source libraries to perform the builds. It would be helpful to have the ability to link to open-source libraries like npm libraries. I don't know if GitHub Actions provides this. I would like to see that in GitHub Actions if they don't. 

If you know the language for your build, it would be wonderful if GitHub automatically provided the link to those language-specific libraries so we don't need to search for the library. 

For example, if I'm using Node.js, I should be in a position to link it to the npm libraries associated with that version so my build using the CI pipeline will work well. Then the results in the library must go into an artifact repository. We'll have to depend on JFrog or Sonatype to provide binary repositories. Git has the repository technology, so why not offer a binary repository feature?

GitHub has a static code repository; now, GitHub Actions provides CI/CD. The resulting packages should stay somewhere. I don't know whether they have added this or not because I have not explored the GitHub Actions. They're all public libraries, and the result of the build or CI pipeline is a deployment-ready package. Where will we keep them? That's where we need a binary repository.

In addition to the binary repository, I think they could also include some vulnerability scans to ensure the code we deliver is clean. SonarQube is a static code analysis we use. There are tools coming from Fortify or Veracode that can ensure there is no security vulnerability in the code. It's a complete CA practice-related tenant. It would be wonderful if they could add this functionality.

We've used GitHub since 2013. 

GitHub performs well with the current load. I haven't had issues with the tool. 

We've never had an with the number of projects or developers using this tool. We've consistently had around a thousand developers over the years. The load will increase If a customer adds another 5,000 developers, then we may see some ups and downs in the scalability aspect of this tool, but we are all good with the scalability and stability so far.

I haven't interacted with the support team because things are working well and we've never had issues with the platform. 

We used open-source Git and later used GitLab, which is a flavor of Git. GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure Repos are all flavors of Git. The underlying version-control functionalities come from Git, but different vendors have their own flavors. I have experience in all four of these, which are Git.

I wasn't involved in the initial installation, but I installed the open-source flavor of Git, which was straightforward. Enabling the AD or LDAP is the most important thing in the enterprise setup. I have not looked into that because the customer enabled it. I never got a chance to integrate LDAP with the access management system within GitHub.

It's a GAT now. We are using the enterprise edition. I don't use open-source any longer. I have no clue because it's all owned by the customer. We are only consultants in the project, right? So we don't have access to those details.

I rate GitHub 10 out of 10. If you are using GitHub, your development team should define the branching strategy. One popular solution is Gitflow. There are different branching strategies available. You can use the main branch loan and a toggling feature development approach where one branch is sufficient. 

However, people with parallel releases need a parallel development strategy, where multiple branches will come into play. You should consider which branching strategies apply to your current industry and development strategy. Pick one of them, learn, and adopt it in your project.

We primarily use this for repairing a broken Git repository. I don't usually use it and others on the team, as far as I know, don't necessarily use it in the normal workflow, but it is pretty good when you have really messed up your repository. It lets you dive in visually and see what you've done. It's better than the command line tools.

This product has helped because we have been able to fix problems when our code repository breaks.

The most valuable feature is the ability to fix a broken repository merge. Some of the things that you now see in Bitbucket from Atlassian that are on the cloud-hosted version are now starting to creep into that market over the standalone desk version.

The interface is pretty user-friendly.

For everyday use, I am more comfortable using the command line interface, rather than using SourceTree.

The way our system works for software deployment, having to install this product is inconvenient.

There is a cost for using this product, whereas the command line is at no charge.

I have been using Atlassian SourceTree for approximately five years.

We have experienced no bugs or crashes that I know of.

Given that it is installed on individual machines, it would be easy enough to scale. I would say that about 40% of our development team uses it for fixing issues. Sometimes, even newer developers will use it.

I have not had contact with technical support.

Prior to SourceTree, we would have used TortoiseHg or TortoiseSVN. That would have been when we used Subversion and Mercurial, but since there's no Tortoise version for Git, we used SourceTree.

The initial setup is easy.

There is a fee for using SourceTree.

When people get into a jam, we tell them to use this product and try to see if they can solve it. That is if they weren't able to figure it out using the command-line tool.

I guess that GitHub is trying to push into that too, where now they've now got a GitHub Command Line Interface, that's I think supposedly trying to mirror what the web version does on the command line, but still using Git on the backend. I wonder if that's something that SourceTree or Bitbucket might look at and say, how do they make a tool that works, still Git on the backend, but gives you a visualization in their GUI tool. But then, you use it possibly like GitHub's doing with their GitHub Command-Line, where you get some convenience operators. I guess the trick there is just going to be maintaining Git compatibility and not having to learn a totally different workflow.

In summary, this is a product that works for the case where I need it, but it's not something that I use all of the time. I'm not sure what it would take for me to use it regularly, or how I might better integrate it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using IBM Rational ClearCase in Peru at two large banks for a code repository. However, it is not meant to be used as a repository.

I have found it very difficult to understand many functionalities in IBM Rational ClearCase. We have had many problems and it is not user-friendly. 

I have used IBM Rational ClearCase within 12 months.

IBM Rational ClearCase is a stable solution. I have not had any difficulty with reliability.

The scalability of IBM Rational ClearCase is not easy.

I have previously used Bitbucket which was a better solution than IBM Rational ClearCase.Additionally, I have used Harvest and it is an older solution but easier to use, efficient, and simple. 

IBM Rational ClearCase was difficult to do the proof of concept. It took us approximately 20 steps to develop it at the bank branch. In other solutions, such as Harvest, I only need to click the mouse once. The whole implementation was difficult.

I did not find this solution to be very good. It is not the worse solution but there are others available.

I rate IBM Rational ClearCase a five out of ten.