GitLab vs Bitbucket: Battle of the DevOps Tools
Choosing between GitLab and Bitbucket can be a tough decision for developers and project managers. Both offer a wide range of features to support modern DevOps practices, including code review, build automation, and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD). In this Flare Compare blog post, we'll compare these two popular DevOps tools based on key metrics such as pricing plans, user feedback, and more to help you make the best decision for your team's needs.
Pricing Plans
Pricing is undoubtedly an essential factor that affects most team's decision-making process. So, we will start the comparison with pricing plans offered by GitLab and Bitbucket.
GitLab offers four distinct pricing models: Free, Bronze, Silver, and Gold. The Free plan is suitable for small teams or MVPs and provides limited CI/CD minutes. The Bronze plan, starting at $4 per user per month, aims to support small businesses and offers audit logging and additional CI/CD minutes. The Silver and Gold plans, starting at $19 and $99 per user per month, respectively, offer advanced features such as security testing, geo-replication, and more.
On the other hand, Bitbucket offers four pricing options too: Free, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise. The Free plan is similar to GitLab and offers unlimited private repositories for small teams. Bitbucket Standard, starting at $3 per user per month, offers additional storage, faster builds, and deployment options. Bitbucket Premium offers more robust features such as flexible deployments, advanced permissions, and advanced CI/CD capabilities for $6 per user per month. Finally, Bitbucket Enterprise offers more advanced features like disaster recovery, ITSM integration, and SAML SSO, but only provides custom pricing.
In terms of pricing, GitLab offers more features in their Free plan than Bitbucket, but Bitbucket's Standard and Premium plans are priced lower than GitLab's.
User Feedback
Next, let's compare user feedback scores for both tools. User feedback is crucial to deciding which DevOps tool to use, and measuring it is the best way to analyze the success rate of both platforms.
To compare user feedback, we'll use the G2, which is a B2B software review platform. According to G2, both GitLab and Bitbucket have positive user feedback scores, but GitLab has the higher overall score with 4.3 out of 5, while Bitbucket has 4.2 out of 5.
CI/CD Capabilities
CI/CD is one of the most critical features of modern-day DevOps practices, and both GitLab and Bitbucket offer robust CI/CD capabilities. GitLab's CI/CD is integrated, while Bitbucket integrates with third-party systems such as Jenkins, Bamboo, or CircleCI.
GitLab also offers automatic testing, code quality reporting, and container registry integrated into the CI/CD pipeline. The pipeline can be customized as per the unique needs of the team to ensure continuous integration and delivery of software. Bitbucket's CI/CD, however, might not be as feature-rich as GitLab's, but it is still robust and can handle most DevOps workflows.
Conclusion
Both GitLab and Bitbucket are popular DevOps tools with unique features that make them stand out from each other. GitLab is an all-in-one platform that offers many built-in features but comes with higher pricing. Bitbucket, on the other hand, offers a range of pricing options for teams while still offering several essential DevOps features.
In conclusion, to choose between GitLab and Bitbucket, you need to weigh the importance of various features, including pricing plans, user feedback, and CI/CD capabilities. Once you've determined which elements are most important, you'll be able to make an informed decision that best suits your team's needs.