Comparison of DVCS hosting - Github, Bitbucket, Assembla, Unfuddle, Kiln & more | Hacker News Reader

Comparison of DVCS hosting - Github, Bitbucket, Assembla, Unfuddle, Kiln & more

journal.uggedal.com

46 pointsuggedal29 comments

I know that the author says this is a high level overview... but the extra features that DVCS hosting companies add on top of repository hosting is practically the entire value-add of using a repository hosting site vs. setting up your own server or just dropboxing your git projects.

I know I'm biased, but for me I could care less about features like price per GB. Features like GitHub's Branch List page, Compare View, Commit Comments, and Web UI are the entire reason I push private repositories.

Trust me, I wish I could afford to use Github. But with the twenty-something private repositories I have now I'd be shelling out $50 a month. I find this a bit pricey considering that these private repositories probably takes less than 50MB combined.

To get around the private repository cap one could use one repository with every project as a separate branch. But I imagine such a solution would be a PITA to manage.

I have to ask, if your total combined space is 50MB, why did you choose disk space as the axis of comparison across all these hosts?

The major factor was repository count. I eliminated all providers with restrictions on the amount of private repositories before comparing the remaining providers across disk space.

Indeed. The company I work for does our own git hosting, but we mirror all repositories to github for features like these.

I've used RepositoryHosting.com for a bit over a year, and its one of the best deals I've ever gotten. We have a repo for each client project, so like the author we require unlimited repositories although our disk space needs are low.

We don't need the project management offerings that are included with Unfuddle and others, so its a good fit for us. I've worked with Unfuddle as well, and its a great deal if you'd benefit from some Basecampish features.

I'm another very happy RepositoryHosting client. The support is very responsive and the I've never faced an downtime.

I only knew of about half of those, so the list alone is valuable to me. I'll have to try a few myself, thanks!

To those interested, I've been using Unfuddle for a while, and a super-basic review:

Pretty quick, clean, and most importantly loads of very helpful (?) documentation popups for n00bs (myself included). Someone who's never used Git can jump on Unfuddle and be functional very quickly. I believe they use Trac for a ticketing system, but I'm not familiar enough with it to say for sure.

haven't heard of unfuddle before but it seems like a great deal. nice how it has svn, git and ticketing.

Nice post. You forgot about codaset.com that has an interesting pricing model explained here: http://codaset.com/codaset/codaset/blog/official-launch-day-...

Added Codaset to the article.

I went through this exact process a few weeks ago, when I started using Mercurial as my main source control. This article would have helped a lot.

I settled on Codebasehq, btw, and I'm extremely happy so far.

Kiln, like FogBugz, also offers a Student & Startup account that's completely free for 2 users.

Disclaimer: I work on Kiln and FogBugz, but this is relevant to the article's assessments.

Beanstalk was left off as well, they support Git as of a month and change ago.

I like them because of FTP/SFTP deployment, and they hook into all of the other info management and communication tools I use.

Springloops -- link: http://springloops.com/ -- also do FTP/SFTP/SCP deployments and provide a much more flexible way of handling deployments in comparison to Beanstalk. The only let down is that they only support SVN at the moment, but I do know that if you ask for beta access you can use Git.

However, I've been waiting on them to implement Git functionality for well over 5 months now and still no luck :(

Added Beanstalk. Due to their restrictions on private repository count my conclusion is unchanged.

for private repos we just setup a separate git user on a cloud machine, add everyone's public keys and make backups. it's really not more hassle and then we don't have to explain to a client that their source lives somewhere other than an environment that we control.

cloud machine = Amazon?

or any of the others

Also missing from the list is ProjectLocker.com. They offer several Git plans[1]. I'm using their free plan for my private projects and am very happy with them.

[1] https://projectlocker.com/scenario/startup

Great table layouts. I was hoping for a large summarizing table at the end, however, because it was hard to directly compare two tables without a lot of scrolling.

Maybe I am missing what you're saying but the conclusion at the end summarizes everything quite nicely in context of the original purpose which is stated as "Please note that this is a fairly high level overview of DVCS hosting providers where I focused mainly on price for private repositories and allocated disk space."

Why would you need a gigantic table in this case?

Sometimes I like to form my own conclusions.

Terrific and clear comparison. I've been wondering about where to go with private repos...thanks for answering this question and having clear recommendations.

I have several repositories with personal and client related code which needs to stay private (like wasitup‘s source).

Because what a tragedy it would be if someone saw the source code to a site that does an HTTP request and occasionally sends email. It would save a "competitor" like 15 seconds!

  $ ~/dev/wasitup cloc .
        85 text files.
        84 unique files.                              
        20 files ignored.
  
  http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.08  T=0.5 s (130.0 files/s, 12730.0 lines/s)
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Language          files     blank   comment      code    scale   3rd gen. equiv
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Python               47       688       214      3658 x   4.20 =       15363.60
  HTML                 14       283        20       831 x   1.90 =        1578.90
  CSS                   1        66         8       282 x   1.00 =         282.00
  Javascript            1        30         2       155 x   1.48 =         229.40
  Lua                   1        15        11        67 x   4.00 =         268.00
  Bourne Shell          1         7         0        28 x   3.81 =         106.68
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  SUM:                 65      1089       255      5021 x   3.55 =       17828.58
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Less lines of code than my Emacs configuration. Seriously.

My point: Writing 5000 lines of code in higher level languages takes more than 15 seconds.

I said "replicate your app", not "write 5000 lines of code".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com