GitLab integrates with multiple third-party services to allow external issue trackers and external authentication.
GitLab can integrate with many third-party apps to allow external issue tracking and authentication. It can also be integrated with several services, such as:
Slack
Campfire
Flowdock
Hipchat
Gemnasium
Pivotal Tracker
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 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.
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.
A protected master branch means that no code can be merged to master without passing a code review by an authorised developer. With GitLab this comes out of the box.
EE is the commercial Enterprise Edition, CE is the free and OpenScource Community Edition. Features such as Cycle Analytics were first a part of the EE and are now also available in CE.
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.
A single instance can handle up to 40,000 users (requires a server with 64 core CPU and 64 GB of RAM) and it can run on multiple application servers to grow beyond that.
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.
Versions available for Linux, Mac and Windows. This is possible because Gitea is developed in the Go language which makes it compact and fast too. Only one executable is needed.
Versions available for Linux, Mac and Windows. This is possible because Gitea is developed in the Go language which makes it compact and fast too. Only one executable is needed.
Users have experienced several half a day downtimes, almost every month. True, github is down once in a while, but when GitHub is down complaints breaks loose on Twitter, TechCrunch, and other major media outlets. For the past 5 years github has been down only three times, and two of these times they were attacked by major adversaries.
Bitbucket offers unlimited private repositories for free, as long as the number of members in a team is not larger than 5. In other words, it does not charge for each number of private repository, instead it charges by the number of team members.
Atlassian offers student licenses for both students and educators for Atlassian products that will be used in a classroom setting for education. This includes BitBucket, which means that students and teachers can have unlimited private repositories with and unlimited number of contributors.
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.
Each of these products have hundreds of thousands of users who use them daily and this has allowed Atlassian to garner a lot of goodwill from the dev community.
BitBucket has a feature which allows users to import an existing repository that has been hosted elsewhere.
The process is very simple, either a service is selected from a dropdown menu and then a repo can be chosen and the URL for a repository can be added in the specified field. Once that's done, the repository is now uploade into BitBucket and can be edited, forked and compared to other repos hosted there.
JIRA, the widely used project and issue tracker is developed by Atlassian, the same team that's behind BitBucket.
When the two are integrated, JIRA automatically updates issues when a new commit is made in the BitBucket repo.
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 and can be connected to BitBucket and/or other code hosting services.
There is currently no way to search for source code inside BitBucket repositories through their website. The only way to search is by downloading the repository and searching through it locally or using external applications.
GitHub only offers two states for issues, which makes following your team's workflow cumbersome. There are solutions that have been built on top of Github, but then you have your information in two places.
GitHub doesn't allow you to prioritize your issues. Given that you have only open and closed states as well and no priorities, filtering the issues is very limited.
GitHub has integrated issue tracking that makes 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 hosted on it.
GitHub's search box is a powerful tool that allows developers to find open source projects in areas they are interested in and where they can immediately start to contribute.
GitHub also has a page dedicated solely at exploring and finding open source projects, grouping them by each topic they cover. In the same view, GitHub displays trending repositories and sorting them by day, week or month.
GitHub supports searching code. Whether it's from a specific project or from the whole website. What's more, GitHub has excellent SEO and you can easily find any line of code hosted on public repos on GitHub even from Google.
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'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.
Gists is GitHub's way to easily share code, text snippets or any kind of information with the world. They are an easy way to share text and they work as Git repos, which means that they are forkable and versioned. They are also fully compatible with Git.
GitHub has easy and useful features to control teams, large and small alike. Team members can be given different powers on different projects, ranging from the ability to create them, to only being able to have read-only access.
Many widely used cloud hosting services are easily integrated with GitHub. Any project hosted on GitHub can be set up on these services in seconds. Some companies that offer this feature are:
Amazon Web Services
Google Cloud
Heroku
Windows Azure
If your organization has Subversion or Mercurial repositories, you can manage all of them with one tool. This makes it easier for teams to find the information they are looking for and getting things done.
Deveo has the ability to define multiple states to issue tracking, as well as multiple milestones or boards. This will allow you to model your team's workflow as it is, not just "open" and "closed" states for issues.
The Launchpad UI is very outdated and it's not very user friendly. Browsing code is a hassle because everything is a few levels deep.
Unlike other code hosting services, which have an intuitive UI and users can go virtually anywhere from the main view, Launchpad's main view of a repository is a mess. There is a lot of information crammed into and it gets confusing real quick.
Instead of just displaying on the main view the explanation of what a repository is for and links to navigate to other parts of the repo, it also shows almost every information about that repo. This is all crammed into a single view which makes it very disorienting, especially for someone who is not used to Launchpad.
Namely bzr-git, bzr-svn, bzr-hg are Bazaar plugins that allow users to access Git, Subversion and Mercurial branches just like they would native Bazaar branches.
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.
CodePlex does not offer the option to have private repositories at all, and it's understandable because CodePlex was built to host open-source projects.