When comparing Pivotal Tracker vs Bitbucket's bug tracker, the Slant community recommends Bitbucket's bug tracker for most people. In the question“What are the best free bug-tracking tools for programming? ” Bitbucket's bug tracker is ranked 4th while Pivotal Tracker is ranked 30th. The most important reason people chose Bitbucket's bug tracker is:
Bitbucket offers unlimited private repositories for free, as long as the number of members in a team is not larger than 5. BitBucket does not use GitHub's pricing plan, instead of charging users for each private repo, it charges teams per number of team members. It is free for up to 5 people.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Flexible
While not perfect kanban, Pivotal is somewhat flexible in that you can mark sections of stories. So rather than (or in addition to) a normal sprint, you can put a marker in to define all cards above that point as part of something, for example a release. Further, you can override the auto tracker and define how many points in a sprint. So there is some degree of flexibility which sometimes you don’t find in “purist” agile or scrum tools.
Pro Great software to use in conjunction with a disciplined agile/scrum development philosophy
Pivotal Tracker has a Kanban feel to it, but takes a more opinionated “Agile” approach to feature management: It encourages items in the flow to be user stories with effort points associated to them to allow Pivotal to calculate your team’s velocity.
If you agree with the workflow, Pivotal offers a ton of functionality not provided by more generic tools like Trello. You can see your team’s velocity over time, organic smaller Stories into “Epics” (huge features) etc.
Pro Stories can contain media files
Easy to create features/bugs/chores with embedded files (screenshots, docs, videos).
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. BitBucket does not use GitHub's pricing plan, instead of charging users for each private repo, it charges teams per number of team members. It is free for up to 5 people.
Pro Supports both Mercurial and Git
Has full support for both Mercurial and Git VCS.
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 which can be connected to BitBucket and other code hosting services.
Pro Multiple authentication methods
BitBucket supports GitHub, Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, Google and even GitHub authentication.
Cons
Con No Kanban-board
To get a good overview often Kanban boards are used. You can somehow imitate a board, but it is not comparable to a real Kanban-board.
Con Limited Work Flow & Process
Few story states. If your process involves some sort of QA and sign off, forget it - you get started, deliver, accept/reject, and finished. No way to customize this to your process. Sad miss for an easy fix/configuration.
Con Non-Editable Default Templates
Templates for defining stories and bugs save time. Pivotal has a default for story and bug. However you can’t edit these. So when you go to add your own, the titles can be confusing to users. Maybe title like “Our User Story” and “Our Bug”? Users will see all templates in the drop down and it’s confusing, so you end up with peope using the wrong templates which adds to process problems.
Con No Saved & Shared Views
Everything is in a column. Aside from destroying Kanban, it also gets confusing. The real downside here is that there’s no way to save a set of columns and pin for others to quickly see. Everyone on the team is usually looking at a completely different set of work. This is literally the definition of not being on the same page.
Con Not usable for multiple projects
If you want / need to have an overview of all the tasks going on over different projects and if you have these organized in different projects, there is no way to get an overview beside reporting. Just take a look at the screenshot and you see what you can expect.
Con The UI seems old and not very polished
While GitHub's UI is extremely simple to understand and very polished, BitBucket lacks a bit on this category. With a design that seems old and not as pleasant to look at.
Con Only 5 users are free
5 users free: Unlimited private repos, Dedicated support, Code reviews, Custom domains, JIRA integration, REST API.
Con Integration with other tools is not as good as github
Most of the 3rd party tools ( bug trackers, CI servers, chat servers, etc) always integrate with GitHub first, and either don't integrate with Bitbucket at all or do sub par job in it. For example there are 3 separate projects to allow building and verifying pull request submissions on Jenkins CI server and there is only one viable one for BitBucket and that one is really buggy and lacking many features.
The only exception to this rule is Atlassian products like Jira.