When comparing Phabricator vs Bitbucket, the Slant community recommends Bitbucket for most people. In the question“What are the best Git web interfaces?” Bitbucket is ranked 4th while Phabricator is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Bitbucket is:
BitBucket comes with an integrated issue/tickets management system.
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 Integrated issue tracking system
BitBucket comes with an integrated issue/tickets management system.
Pro Free unlimited private repositories for small teams
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.
Pro Native application for both Mac and Windows
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.
Pro Multiple authentication methods
BitBucket supports Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, Google and even GitHub authentication.
Pro JIRA integration
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.
Pro Allows importing existing repositories
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.
Pro Supports hosting static websites
BitBucket supports uploading and hosting static HTML pages for it's users.
Pro Unlimited contributors for private repositories for students/educators
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.
Pro Backed by a trustable company that has proved it's worth
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.
Pro Easy Trello integration
You can link BitBucket with your Trello board easily.
Pro Excellent tutorials
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 Private repositories are free for only 5 users
Private repositories are free for teams with 5 members or less. If a team is larger, then BitBucket charges for each additional team member.
Con Proprietary
Con Not as stable as github
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.
Con Requires registration of a "universal atlassian account"
Not a big con for some, but annoying to others.