When comparing RhodeCode vs Meat!, the Slant community recommends RhodeCode for most people. In the question“What are the best self-hosted web-based Git repository managers?” RhodeCode is ranked 7th while Meat! is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose RhodeCode is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro High security
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.
Pro Supports 3 major version control systems
RhodeCode supports Mercurial, Git and Subversion in a unified way that allows you to do code-reviews and other stuff on each of them.
Pro Centralized user management
User management is centralized around administrators which can give granular permissions to individual users or user groups/. These permissions can be related to allowing contributions, editing, or simply giving read-only access to users.
Pro Powerful and flexible code review
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.
Pro Free and Open Source
RhodeCode CE (Community Edition ) is free and open source. Enterprise Edition (EE) adds premium support, corporate authentication. and tool integrations on top of the RhodeCode CE.
Pro Integrates fully with LDAP/AD and others
RhodeCode has auth plugins, now supported include: LDAP, LDAP with user groups, TOKEN, Container auth, PAM
Pro Online editing with preview
Files can be added, modified and deleted from the web interface, including adding directories, and uploading files.
Pro Best in class permission system
RhodeCode have the most advanced Permission system on the market, allowing things like permission inheritance, permission delegation. All comes in a format that doesn't get hard to manage at scale.
Pro Header authentication plugin allows auth delegation to 3rd party systems
The builtin header auth can delegate authentication to other existing systems for further validation chain.
Pro Nice material design
The design is minimalistic and based on today's standarts on material design. It uses colors which are pleasing to the eye and displays the information in an ordered way. The main view shows the latest activity sorted in a chronological order, displaying commits and pushes.
Every repo has it's own view, on the top there's the repo's name and a dropdown which displays the current branch with the ability to change to another branch or to create a new one.
On the right there's a vertical menu with links to add a new file, show the history or to download the current repository.
Pro Deployment is very easy
Deploying Meat! is very easy and it can be done in multiple platforms by using Virtual Machines such as Mware Fusion, VirtualBox, VM Workstation & Payer, or vSphere.
Cons
Con Hard to maintain and upgrade
The documentation is not very clear and it's hard to troubleshoot if there is a failure.
Con Not open source with a license prone to errors
Although the self-hosted version is completely free and unlimited, it's not open source. It's proprietary license is filled with errors and it's open to a lot of interpretations in the future.
For example:
IF YOU DO NOT OWN THE SOFTWARE, THEN DO NOT DOWNLOAD,
INSTALL, COPY OR USE THE SOFTWARE.
Should be:
You further acknowledge that title and full ownership
rights to the Software will remain the exclusive property
of BigHit and/or its suppliers,