This is always a bit of a hot topic, especially amongst teams just getting ready to start properly managing their code through remote repositories.
Disclaimer: I’m only going to talk about GitHub and BitBucket in this article. If your code is your bread and butter, your only offering; you probably should consider hosting your repositories yourself. I’m also sticking with these two as they’re the most widely adopted.
When should I use GitHub?
GitHub can be found at github.com – shameless plug, my user on there is @johnothecoder
Short answer: For anything/everything open source, or where you’d hope for community feedback and maybe even code contributions.
Personally, anything Open Source I think massively benefits from being on GitHub; it’s much more community orientated and you can host as many open/public repositories as you like.
It has some really handy graphs and charts about activity on your repository, and most developers who have anything to do with anything open source will have a GitHub account. On occasion I’ve even been contacted by recruitment agents who have found me through my GitHub, which is kind of cool.
The community on GitHub can be really helpful (though as with all things online there’s always a risk of being flamed) and GitHub, because of its huge market share has ready made integrations, if you’re looking to integrate something into your repository GitHub will almost definitely have it.
When should I use BitBucket?
Short answer: For professional development teams or closed source development
Bitbucket can be found at bitbucket.org
I personally find that, especially for new or small development teams, BitBucket is great. You also get unlimited free private repositories, pricing is instead based on the amount of seats you need (that is, developers on your team who need access to the repository).
So for a professional development team I would always recommend BitBucket, it has all of the features you need – and comes with one very handy thing, which in a professional context gives it, I think, the edge on GitHub: Jira.
Jira is probably, in my experience anyway, the most widely adopted tool for managing development of software. It has a whole host of awesome features, which I’m not going to bang on about as, frankly, they sell it well enough themselves on their website.
However, as most project managers, digital managers, development managers and developers have all used Jira the ready made integration really comes in handy. Those integrations, which will also support you if you make the decision to move into agile, are really handy for growing teams.
Comparison
When it comes to both of these tools (GitHub and BitBucket) they share a lot of handy functionality, which is one of the reasons I’ve never particularly wanted to stray (GitLab can be hosted on your own server and comes with these functionalities too); these features include bug/issue management, wiki, Packagist integration and various other things.
Realistically they’re no better or worse than one another – GitHub comes with integration into Basecamp as standard so that could be handy for digital agencies. Realistically, they will both serve you very well.