When comparing GitLab issues vs BitBucket Issue Tracker, the Slant community recommends GitLab issues for most people. In the question“What are the best self-hosted bug trackers?” GitLab issues is ranked 1st while BitBucket Issue Tracker is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose GitLab issues is:
GitLab's UI is clean and intuitive. Each view is designed to not fill the screen with useless information. It displays the activity in a feed-type way in the most prominent part of the view. On top of that, there's a toolbar with buttons which can filter this feed by pushes, merge events or comments. On the left, there's a menu that displays all the links that take you to the different views. For example, a file directory which displays all the files in that repo, a commit view which displays all the commits in cronological order, a network and a graph view that display important information graphically etc... All these details make GitLab's UI extremely intuitive and easy to use, no view is overflown with information and every view displays only the most useful and crucial information needed at that time.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Good web UI
GitLab's UI is clean and intuitive. Each view is designed to not fill the screen with useless information.
It displays the activity in a feed-type way in the most prominent part of the view. On top of that, there's a toolbar with buttons which can filter this feed by pushes, merge events or comments.
On the left, there's a menu that displays all the links that take you to the different views. For example, a file directory which displays all the files in that repo, a commit view which displays all the commits in cronological order, a network and a graph view that display important information graphically etc...
All these details make GitLab's UI extremely intuitive and easy to use, no view is overflown with information and every view displays only the most useful and crucial information needed at that time.
Pro Comes with integrated CI/CD solution
GitLab CI makes it easy to set up CI and deployment for projects in GitLab. It supports parallel testing, multiple platforms, Docker containers and streaming build logs.
Pro Regular updates
GitLab is being constantly worked on and has a new release every month on the 22nd. Updating is also very easy through a single upgrade script.
Pro Issues can have weight
On GitLab EE (free for open-source projects only) you can set the weight of an issue during its creation (from 1 to 9) to get a better idea of how much time, value or complexity a given issue has.
Pro Free for up to 5 users
You can use BitBucket for free if you have 5 or less users (or try it out for free). Price brackets are for 10, 25, 50, 100, or unlimited users (it costs $1 per user per month, or $200 for unlimited users).
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 Supports both Mercurial and Git
Has full support for both Mercurial and Git VCS.
Cons
Con Search functionality is not that refined
While you can search for users or projects, you cannot search for a filename. This makes GitLab's search one of the weak points in an otherwise great tool.
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.