When comparing Phabricator vs RhodeCode, the Slant community recommends RhodeCode for most people. In the question“What are the best Git web interfaces?” RhodeCode is ranked 9th while Phabricator is ranked 12th. 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 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
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.
Cons
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.
Con Hard to maintain and upgrade
The documentation is not very clear and it's hard to troubleshoot if there is a failure.