10 reasons why teams are switching from GitHub to Bitbucket after Microsoft acquisition

After the announcement of Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub, Bitbucket started to see a spike in the number of GitHub users migrating their repositories to Bitbucket. Why? Many users understand they can get everything they had on GitHub in Bitbucket plus more, and at a lower cost. Tens of thousands of customers – including 60 of Fortune 100 – turn to Bitbucket as their code collaboration solution.

Start migrating from GitHub to Bitbucket

10 reasons why teams are moving from GitHub to Bitbucket Cloud

1. Price

Teams can save 4x the cost moving from GitHub to Bitbucket. For example, if you are a team of 10 on GitHub, you have to pay $205 a month, while on Bitbucket you’re only paying $50. Bitbucket also offers free public and private repositories for teams with less than 5 users. GitHub doesn’t offer a free plan for users who want private repositories. On GitHub, even an individual developer has to pay $7 a month.

2. Superior integration with Jira

It’s been known for a long time that one of the best benefits of using Bitbucket is it’s best-in-class integration with Jira – the worlds number 1 agile software development tool for teams.

GitHub has an integration too, but check out all the things you can do with Bitbucket and Jira that you can’t do with GitHub:

  • Create branches directly from Jira issues and start coding quickly. Nope, you can’t do that with GitHub.
  • Interact with Jira issues without leaving Bitbucket. View, edit, comment or transition Jira issues inside Bitbucket’s UI. You can even add attachments to issues from Bitbucket. Nope, GitHub can’t do that either.
  • Automatically connect commits, branches, and pull requests to Jira issues by adding the Jira issue key in the commit message. You can even require Jira issue keys in your commits so all of your work stays organized.
  • Connecting Bitbucket and Jira only takes 30 seconds.

3. Built-in Continuous Integration and Delivery

On Bitbucket, you get a built in CI/CD solution that is unified with your source code. There are no CI servers to set up, user management to configure or repositories to synchronize. Just enable it within the UI and you’re done. What about with GitHub? Nope. GitHub doesn’t have a CI/CD solution. You have to go through the headache of finding, installing, configuring a new tool, setting up all your users over again, and you don’t benefit from the end-to-end visibility because all your CI information lives in a separate tool.

4. Bitbucket comes with Trello

This means the moment you set up a Bitbucket account, you get a Trello board – the fastest, easiest way to organize your projects, connect your work to code, and ship software, all for free.

5. SOC 2 Type II Compliance

With SOC 2 Type II compliance for both Jira Software and Bitbucket, the availability and security of your code is guaranteed. All the benefits of working in the cloud is now matched with an industry-first level of security, confidentiality, and availability for both your work and your code. Nah, GitHub is not SOC 2 Type II compliant.

6. Seamless integrations within the UI

Bitbucket Connect allows any developer to build deep integrations within the product UI in Bitbucket Cloud. You can stay within one tool to build and ship your software meaning no more context-switching between tools and tasks to get stuff done.

7. Code aware search

Semantic search that does the grunt work for you. Code aware search analyzes your code syntax, ensuring definitions matching your search term are prioritized over usages and variable names. With GitHub, you don’t get smart sorting and could spend hours finding what you need.

8. Deployments

Bitbucket Deployments is the first deployment solution that sits next to your source code and can be configured with a single line of code. Now there's no need to set up and maintain a separate deployment tool, or scroll through unrelated builds in your CI service to analyze deployments. Bitbucket can manage and track your code from development through code review, build, test, and deployment – all the way to production.

9. Great for Open source projects too

Think GitHub is the answer for open source projects? Did you know Bitbucket also offers free public repos as well and hosts several large open source projects?

10. Using Slack?

With the Bitbucket bot for Slack, teams can take action from their channel – merge, comment, and even nudge reviewers on pull requests. With the Bitbucket Stride integration, you can “poke” people reviewing your PR as well. Nah, GitHub doesn’t have that either.

Are you self-hosting? Here are six reasons teams choose Bitbucket Server:

1. Price

Our enterprise offering, Bitbucket Data Center, is 4x less expensive than GitHub Enterprise. For an engineering organization of 100 on GitHub Enterprise, you’ll pay $25,000 for a year. Bitbucket Data Center costs a fraction at $6000.

2. Native integration with Jira

It’s been known for a long time that one of the best benefits of using Bitbucket is it’s best-in-class integration with Jira – the worlds number 1 agile software development tool for teams. GitHub has an integration too, but check out all the things you can do with Bitbucket and Jira that you can’t do with GitHub:

  • Create branches directly from a Jira issue and start coding quickly. Nope, you can’t do that with GitHub.
  • Interact with Jira issues without leaving Bitbucket. View, create, comment or transition Jira issues inside Bitbucket’s UI. You can’t do that with GitHub either. 
  • Automatically connect commits, branches, and pull requests to Jira issues by adding the Jira issue key in the commit message. You can even require Jira issue keys in your commits so nothing get’s lost. Then, use Jira query language to find important development details – for example, search for all Jira issues with the status of “commit”.
  • Best part of all, connecting Bitbucket and Jira only takes 30 seconds.

3. Bitbucket has better mirroring

GitHub Enterprise finally added mirroring Git repositories across different geographic locations, but can it keep up with Bitbucket Data Center? Select which projects are mirrored in a geographic location and Bitbucket will automatically sync and inherit user permissions. GitHub mirrors every repository, creating a bottleneck when pushing changes out.

4. Customizable pull request workflows

Bitbucket allows you to choose between five different merge strategies, create (and require) custom merge conditions, and configure default reviewers. GitHub expects you to use GitHub flow and be happy about it.

5. Superior extensibility

The Atlassian Marketplace houses over 200 Bitbucket Server compatible apps and more than 140 for Bitbucket Data Center. GitHub has 50. Not only do we offer more apps, but you also get access to the self-hosted Bitbucket’s source code. You’ll have to keep your GitHub representative on speed-dial for similar access.

6. Turnkey active-active clustering

We believe Git should scale with you. Easily add nodes to your Bitbucket Data Center cluster as your team grows. GitHub would rather you call them first before you can have an active-active cluster.

Start migrating from GitHub to Bitbucket

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