The default docker.io registry is the docker hub but you can also login to other docker registries. And GitLab provides one for all Repos that make use of this feature.
With GitLab Pages you can host for free your static websites on GitLab. Combined with the power of GitLab CI and the help of GitLab Runner you can deploy static pages for your individual projects, your user or your group.
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is an application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network.
GitLab EE adds additional functionality over CE such as support for multiple LDAP servers and group sync.
Snippets are similar to (well-known) GitHub "gists". They are a way to share code or have conversations about anything without needing a full git repo. The implementation here reminds more of a sort of pastebin.
GitLab CI makes it easy to set up CI and deployment for projects in GitLab. It supports parallel testing, multiple platforms, Docker containers and streaming build logs.
It has private/public repositories, roles for users (master, developer, reporter, guest). All of these can be set from the user interface. Same permissions set for the UI work for the SSH as well.
GitLab's UI is clean and intuitive. Each view is designed to not fill the screen with useless information.
It displays the activity in a feed-type way in the most prominent part of the view. On top of that, there's a toolbar with buttons which can filter this feed by pushes, merge events or comments.
On the left, there's a menu that displays all the links that take you to the different views. For example, a file directory which displays all the files in that repo, a commit view which displays all the commits in cronological order, a network and a graph view that display important information graphically etc...
All these details make GitLab's UI extremely intuitive and easy to use, no view is overflown with information and every view displays only the most useful and crucial information needed at that time.
While you can search for users or projects, you cannot search for a filename. This makes GitLab's search one of the weak points in an otherwise great tool
BitBucket is developed and maintained by Atlassian, which is not an unknown venture, especially for developers. Atlassian has a great number of other products used by million of users worldwide, including JIRA, HipChat, Confluence and Stash.
All of them loved by the notoriously picky developer community, which means that Atlassian has gained a great deal of goodwill from their users.
Atlassian, the company behind BitBucket is also behind SourceTree, a free application for Windows and Mac wich works as a client for both Git and Mercurial which can be connected to BitBucket and other code hosting services.
While GitHub's UI is extremely simple to understand and very polished, BitBucket lacks a bit on this category. With a design that seems old and not as pleasant to look at.
Due to the fact that it's proprietary and that many external services integrate only with GitHub, it's becoming harder and harder to migrate a project away from it.
That will be a big issue the day the company will make controversial choices (like SourceForge)
GitHub has in the past removed content from their site that is not breaking their TOS. Examples such as the E Plus Equality project as well as the operation disrespectful nod repository have been removed despite not breaking any site rules and appear to have been done out of employee distaste.
Considering the amount of content allowed on the site that is full of rude or vulgar humor, to single out these projects for removal shows employee politics and agendas take the front seat over an open and tolerant environment. Which is quite contradictory to open source ideals.
GitHub employees are allowed to enforce their personal political beliefs on projects, regardless of the ToS in force at the time. The project that had been deleted was deleted with no warning and no ToS violations.
GitHub sometimes acts also as a social network for coders. It has different features that allow users to follow or star their favorite projects. The user's account page is like a Facebook wall with projects, pull requests, forks, pushes and merges all displayed. The main dashboard after logging in also displays news from followed developers or projects.
GitHub has integrated issue tracking that make hunting and solving bugs easy. Each project's issues page can be filtered by closed issues, assignees, labels and milestones. Issues are also sortable by age, number of comments and update time.
GitHub is the largest host in the world for open source projects. Developers from all over the world fork and work on countless projects hoset on it. For this, GitHub has some excellent features that help both new and experienced devs to find and commit to open source projects of any kind.
Any user can fork a project and submit a pull request. If accepted by the owner, the fork will be merged with the master branch. Forking in GitHub also is very easy, it's really just a two-click process.
GitHub has added another layer of security to their user accounts. This layer comes in the form of Two-Factor authentication. After it's enabled, GitHub delivers an authentication code by SMS, or by a free application for smartphones. After two-factor authentication is enabled, the authentication code is sent to the account owner's phone any time someone attempts to sign into their GitHub account. This means that only someone who has both the password and authentication code can sign into the account.
GitHub is the largest code host on the planet with over 21.4 million hosted repositories and many users. It's unarguably the largest VCS used by developers worldwide and as such, it has a vibrant community that follows it resulting in many guides and tutorials for new users. Even experienced developers can always find an answer to any question they may have.
GitHub's UI is clean and intuitive. Each view is designed to not fill the screen with useless information.
For example, the repository view displays only the most crucial data about that repo - on the top it displays the number of commits, branches, releases and contributors. When clicked, each of them will take the user to a page that displays more detailed information.
GitHub emulates a bridge on top of git repos, therefore every git repository hosted on GItHub can be accessed with a svn client without losing any features.
Codeberg is community driven and managed by a non-profit organization based in Berlin, Germany. The servers are also managed by them. In conclusion, your privacy and source code is protected!
Fully open source, no subscription plans. Every available feature is provided for free and every new feature with each update will be free as well, forever.
Other project hosts such as GitHub, BitBucket or GitLab have easy, simplistic UIs that help new and experienced developers alike to browse code right through the browser. LaunchPad on the other hand is very weak at this. Most of the projects have poor (if any) documentation and no way to determine a project's worth easily. The fastest way to do so with LaunchPad would be to download the project and look through the code manually, which is quite tiresome.
Though Canonical has acknowledged the site's many shortcomings, they've expressed a clear position that they consider the site's existence an act of generosity and not an investment in a community or brand. This explains why the site has received no material improvements in well over a decade and why they are not likely to occur in the future, either.
The site only has one theme and uses text sizes that don't conform to even rudimentary accessibility standards, so small that you'll need reading glasses even if you otherwise don't.
Launchpad makes it easy to translate free open source projects into virtually any language in the world. Users are allowed to start working on translating any project they want just by having a Launchpad account and a web browser. Most of the time they don't have to even join a team to start working and the editor is web based, so there is no need for any special software.
If you use launchpad, it gives you a build system (on their platform) as well as easier deployment - user merely adds your PPA to their sources.list file. Deployment (on Ubuntu, at least - other debians as well) doesn't get simpler than this.
Launchpad is built to be used for open source projects, as such it needs a powerful bug trackers to allow developers who want to contribute to jump right in. Launchpad displays bug statistics (total number of bugs, number of bugs fixed etc...) as well. Bugs can be searched and displayed from every project hosted on Launchpad or for single projects.
It's open source and it can be installed on your own machine, which gives high security and isolated environment for the codes. Whole application installation is super easy and independent from the Linux distribution.
Code reviews can be done via Pull Requests, or simply commit-by-commit. There are voting rules, random reviewers pools, and smart comment invalidation logic. Pull requests are also versioned so it's easy to review partial changes after the author has updated his code.
When you create a Pull-request you can add set of reviewers. They all have to vote and approve the PR. There's some flexibility on how the voting is accepted, it can be majority wins, or all-agree. Good practice is to add BOT accounts like jenkins, that also will vote on the review, based on for example tests run, and can forbid a merge because of a negative vote. In addition users can leave special type of comments that will also prevent merges, aka TODO notes. Once TODOs are resolved a Pull Request can be merged.
Paide EE version has a really good full text search with advanced filtering options. The free CE edition has also a full text search but it's not that refined
CodePlex's UI is quite complex and could use for some redesign and some new features. Especially for forks and pull requests which do not 'feel' as easy as in other services.
Google has recently announced that they will be discontinuing the Google Code service. Because of the blooming of services such as GitHub and BitBucket, Google themselves decided to host their open source projects on Github as many other developers did, moving from Google Code to other hosts for their open source projects, mainly GitHub and BitBucket. This left only abusive and spam projects hosted on their servers, which forced Google to discontinue their service as they see that there's no more place and need for Google Code.
Google Code's bug tracker is quite powerful. It has a lot of great features packed in such as:
Customizable labeling system
Excellent searching system (it's made by Google after all)
Grid View