Choose the Right Source Code Hosting Service
One of the first important decisions that needs to be made before starting the software development — where to host a source code? When choosing a source code repository, it’s important to consider DevOps tools and integrations around the platform that allows to build efficient software development process. There are a lot of such services nowadays, but let’s take a look at 3 of the most popular: GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket.
GitHub is known as the largest storage of code repositories and developer community in it. Therefore it’s the best place to get a visibility and feedback on your open source project, collaborate about improvements, features, tech decisions. GitHub also has enterprise oriented features available on cloud, on-prem and hybrid deployment options, here you can compare the plans. All it comes with industry’s well known automation tools like GitHub Actions, Dependabot, etc.
Gitlab is the leading DevOps platform focused on the enterprise use cases that allows to configure whole software development process from end to end. It is often chosen as a secure self-hosted or cloud solution to not only host your source code, but also configure your applications and infrastructure, release, plan, verify and much more. Gitlab based on open source that allows them to leverage community contributions to deliver features faster.
Bitbucket is a product of Atlassian company that best known for it’s issue and project tracking software — Jira — so both products has best integration with each other. Atlassian stopped selling self-managed solutions including Bamboo for on-prem release management, so only cloud versions are available with Bitbucket Pipelines for CI/CD. There is also rich set of apps in their marketplace that enables integration with 3-rd party solutions.
Here is a simple summary flow chart to help decide what to choose:
I would also recommend to consider other alternatives, here are some of them:
- Azure DevOps - Microsoft's DevOps platform with robust integrations with Azure cloud
- SourceForge - web service to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software
- Gitea - lightweight open source cross-platform code hosting solution
And finally - useful links to get more details on subject:
