GitHub vs. Bitbucket

For 3 years I used GitHub, then I switched to Bitbucket for 6 years, now I’m switching back to GitHub again.

Why?

And more importantly, which do I think is better?

Well, that’s a complicated question and honestly it depends on you and what you want to do.

What’s the same?

They both have a free tier which offers public & private repositories.

The both have CICD (continuous integration and continuous deployment).

Integrations with a variety of tools to help you.

Both are Git.

In fact, both of them offer such a similar feature set they it’s better to talk about the differences rather than me listing all the similarities.

Community

The community is the biggest difference between the two. Bitbucket was built around business processes and heavily integrates with Jira, which is a management tool for your roadmap and daily tasks.

It’s built by the same company, Atlassian who also runs Confluence, Trello and a variety of other tools.

So the creators of Bitbucket did not design it for a community and as a result, it lacks one.

When you navigate to your public profile on Bitbucket, it’s rather boring and lacks community features for interaction.

Whereas GitHub was built around the community.

You can follow people, star peoples' repositories and make comments on their code.

I personally love the customisable profile page, which allows users to personalise it.

You can see the daily commit image, which is a punch chart of every persons commits going back to the start of their profile.

It’s evidence that a person is a real developer and has a long history of at least writing code.

It’ll show up private commits as well as public ones, although the private ones are hidden and just show the day that for example, 10 commits happened in private repos.

Whereas the public ones, I can click on say, 2012 and view your public repos and see what you did over 10 years ago and compare it to now.

It’s also proof when you say on your CV, I’ve been a developer for 10 years, I can see it on your GitHub account.

Actions vs. Pipelines

Personally, they’re both excellent places to store your code and both have excellent continuous integration, continuous deployment (CICD) methods using GitHub Actions or Bitbucket Pipelines.

Personally I found Bitbucket Pipelines easier to get going, it has better SSH integration and is less work.

But GitHub actions I’d say is more expansive in what you can do when you want to handle a large amount tasks.

GitHub Actions also comes with a better free tier with more build minutes available before you have to pay.

GitHu

GitHub

For

BitBucket

Some of the clear advantages for

Why did I switch?

Originally I switched from GitHub to BitBucket because of a single reason, in 2017, GitHub didn’t offer free private repositories.

And I had a LOT of repositories, many which I wanted to collect in 1 place and keep private.

By the time GitHub offered me private repositories as well, I was so invested in BitBucket that the switch became quite a bit of work so I needed a big reason to actually do it.

So why if they both offer such a similar service did I end up making the switch?

I wanted a more public profile.

I’d gotten into building a YouTube Channel and needed somewhere to share my code and build a community.

GitHub is the clear winner in this category.

So I started my transition of moving all my repositories over and my public profile started to show up my work history for the whole world to see.

Because GitHub will show your commit history even on private repositories for everyone.

It’s credibility that I’m actually a developer and not some hack who’s claiming it by copying others.

In my opinion, if you can prove it, you probably aren’t legit.

And if you aren’t willing to put your name to it, you probably aren’t putting in your full effort.

So this is me and who I am.