GitHub joins Bitbucket in offering free private repos

GitHub joined Bitbucket in providing free private repositories, which is great news for their users and developers in general.

A significant number of individuals and teams work on software projects outside the public eye – be it a proprietary project, gig-economy developers working on software projects for clients, or friends collaborating on a new app or startup idea. Free, unlimited, private repositories are a key component and lower the barrier for getting started with these projects. We saw GitHub move towards this direction of fostering innovation for all by offering free unlimited private repositories for 3 users, and we think it is about time.

At Bitbucket, our goal has always been to help teams innovate and take their inspirations from idea to reality – and do it fast. We believe that real innovation happens when your team adopts modern software development practices and uses the right tools for the job.

With the adoption of continuous delivery and microservices, teams are able to ship much faster to their customers by breaking down monolith applications in to smaller, easier to ship pieces. The days of 1 project to 1 repo to 1 Jira project will change to 1 project to multiple repos (x microservices) to x Jira projects. Having multiple repositories will be standard and unlimited repositories is necessary. Collaboration on taking ideas to delivery requires tools like Trello, Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket Pipelines for a seamless experience across the entire lifecycle. This is key to making developers productive and happy.

Bitbucket will continue to offer free unlimited private repositories for up to 5 users and focus on helping legions of developers team up and collaborate on software projects through:

  • Code reviews – with side-by-side diffs that let you view changes IDE style, transition Jira issues based on pull request status, comment inline, create tasks for code review feedback, and manage comments and likes via Bitbucket's REST API in terminal.
  • Built-in Continuous Delivery – Bitbucket Pipelines has no servers to set up, user management to configure or repos to synchronize. Bitbucket Deployments gives you one place to track and preview deployments, and see what Jira issues are resolved in a particular deployment with our deployments dash.
  • Best of breed integrations with the Atlassian family of products – our Jira integration lets you create branches from issues, interact with issues without leaving Bitbucket, and automatically connect commits, branches, and pull requests to Jira issues. In addition, your team can use Trello boards directly within Bitbucket to keep your backlog and code all in one place.
  • Third party integrations with tools like Slack – teams can take action from their channel – merge, comment, and even nudge reviewers on pull requests.
  • Clean branching – establish team collaboration practices for your project by setting up merge checks, branch permissions and consistent naming decisions with default branch type names like Bugfix, Feature, Hotfix, and Release.

We look forward to helping our developers collaborate and can't wait to show you what we have in store for 2019.

– Harpreet Singh

Head of Product, Bitbucket