When comparing Gerrit vs Phabricator, the Slant community recommends Gerrit for most people. In the question“What are the best Git web interfaces?” Gerrit is ranked 11th while Phabricator is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Gerrit is:
Gerrit supports group and user authorizations for various repositories. Only authorized users can push code to the master branch.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Authorizations for users and groups
Gerrit supports group and user authorizations for various repositories. Only authorized users can push code to the master branch.
Pro Integration with LDAP, bug-tracking tools, CI, etc.
Full integration with LDAP (users, groups), bug-tracking systems (Jira, Bugzilla), CI (Jenkins, Hudson) and other tools.
Pro Configurable project workflow, not always feature branches are the most suitable workflow
Pro Project policy customization can be done with hooks and plugins
Multiple hooks available on various events. Plugin API for more customization of project behavior.
Pro Self-contained installation of Java package, simple upgrades
Most upgrades require only download of new war file and running it in init mode. In some rare cases db reindex is required.
Pro Web UI extension with plugins
A number of plugins available for web UI extension. Plugin API for more customization.
Pro Free and open source
Phabricator is completely free and open source. It's source code is hosted on GitHub.
Pro Actively updated
Phabricator is quickly improving, with bug fixes and new features added often. There is an update to the changelog every couple of weeks.
Pro Bug tracker is included
Includes a bug tracker out of the box. Allows for managing bugs, creating issues, commenting on them and closing them.
Pro Built-in Q&A platform - Ponder
Instead of having to have separate Q&A tool, there's Ponder which takes out the hassle.
Pro Built-in Wiki and pages support
Pro Fully customizeable workboard
You can configure your workspace to deal with tasks, bugs, todo's, etc.
Pro Supports the three major version control systems
Support for Git, SVN and Mercurial is available.
Pro Super flexible bussiness rules (Herald)
Pro Able to review graphical asset changes as well as code.
Pro Fine grained access control
With using Spaces and Project and custom policies you can have any combination of access to any object inside of your own Phabricator instance.
Pro Designed by software engineers for software engineers
The engineering workflow is far superior to Github style branching and merging. Phabricator separates local representations of the repository from remote, which enables a variety of workflow optimisations, like stacked diffs on a single branch.
Pro Code ownership
Users can subscribe to files or even repositories and notifications will be sent when code you are subscribed to is changed.
Pro Command line access (via ARC)
Pro Able to track design mockups
You can track not only code bud also design mockups.
Pro Built-in voting
You can create voting in an instant and need not to rely on external tools.
Pro Built-in blogging platform
There's a great platform which you can use to post stuff, or use as an internal blog, dev blog, release anouncement place and many others.
Pro Built-in chatrooms
Pro Able to manage legal agreements for open source projects
Cons
Con The UI is very cluttered
Gerrit's user interface is very cluttered and messy, and quite ugly to look at. The navigations is also not very intuitive, which may hold some people off.
Con Difficult to customize
Fixing the UI/UX problems with CSS customization is nearly impossible. The markup doesn't include many classes, making it difficult to target CSS rules to specific elements of the interface.
Con For someone who likes formality, this is not for you
Has slang, sarcasm, and other informal things. If you need to stay formal you shouldn't use this. Personally I like it but others may have different opinion.
Con Difficult to configure
Compared to a solution like Bitbucket Server (granted Phabricator offers more options), it is difficult to configure. Settings are scattered everywhere and you must drill down through several screens to find some of them. Documentation is very complete but also not always in parity with the application itself.