[Open beta] Introducing Packages: native container registry in Bitbucket Cloud

[#1]

Hi Bitbucket community! 

We’re thrilled to announce that Bitbucket Packages is now in open beta for all Bitbucket Cloud Standard and Premium workspaces on monthly plans, requiring the Bitbucket workspace to be connected to your company’s Atlassian organization to get started. This new feature introduces a built-in container registry, bringing seamless artifact management directly into your Bitbucket Cloud workflows for a unified experience.

What are Packages?

Bitbucket Packages enables teams to publish, manage, and consume artifacts, beginning with support for a container image registry. It provides a workspace-wide namespace for container images, integrated into Bitbucket Cloud’s user experience. Each image is associated with specific repositories and existing user permissions (Admin, Write, Read) are carried over from the parent repo. We’ve also introduced a new packages API token scope. This ensures secure, streamlined access control without extra configuration.

Why we built it?

Many Bitbucket users rely on external package management solutions, which can lead to:

• Fragmented workflows: Switching between Bitbucket and external tools reduces productivity.

• Permission inconsistencies: Managing permissions in separate systems can introduce security risks.

• Inefficiencies and costs: Using disparate tools for code, CI/CD, and artifact storage creates duplicated efforts and additional costs.

Bitbucket Packages solves these challenges by unifying source code, CI/CD pipelines, and artifact management into a single, streamlined platform.

What’s included in the Beta release?

The Bitbucket Packages Beta is available exclusively for paid Standard and Premium workspaces on monthly plans. Here’s what you get:

• Core functionality: Publish and consume container images directly within Bitbucket Cloud.

• Feedback-driven development: Your insights during the Beta will shape the General Availability (GA) release, coming soon in 2025, and help shape future enhancements.

Important note on pricing at launch

Critical information: Bitbucket Packages is free during the Beta period. However, starting with its general launch, expected in early December 2025, it will transition to a paid pricing model. Charges will be based on your storage and network traffic usage, so it's important to monitor your current consumption to avoid unexpected costs later.

After the general release Bitbucket Packages will remain available for Standard and Premium workspaces on monthly plans with support for annual plans coming later. Below is the pricing breakdown:

Plan	Included storage	Included Monthly Network Traffic
Standard	1 GB	5 GB
Premium	2 GB	7 GB

Beyond these included limits, you’ll only pay for what you use:

• Storage overage: $0.35 USD per GB per month for storage exceeding your plan’s allowance.

• Network traffic overage: $0.70 USD per GB for traffic beyond the included limits.

Once the beta period ends and packages are generally released, which is expected in early December, changes to this feature will affect your billing. We’ll share the exact release date via in-app alerts, the Bitbucket community, and our blog. Stay informed by monitoring your usage and checking our notifications.

How to get started

Visit our support documentation for step-by-step guidance on setting up and managing Bitbucket Packages. The registry operates at the workspace level, with images linked to repositories for easy management and access control.

What’s next

The Beta is just the start of our journey with Bitbucket Packages. As we move toward GA and beyond, we’re working on:

• Deletion and garbage collection: Image deletion and automated garbage collection model to help optimize storage by cleaning up unused images.

• Enhanced Pipelines integration: Seamless, end-to-end authentication within Bitbucket Pipelines.

• Additional package types: Expanding support beyond container images to include additional package registries like maven, npm, and more.

Share your feedback

Your experience with Bitbucket Packages plays a key role in shaping its future. We invite you to try out the container registry, explore its features, and share your feedback in the thread below. Whether you have suggestions, questions, or need assistance, this thread is the perfect place to connect, report issues, and exchange ideas. Your input will directly impact the GA release and beyond. Stay tuned for updates as we get closer to GA, and let us know how Packages is working for you.

[Ryan Taylor]

Bitbucket has been sorely lacking from the competition in this area so I'm excited to see this come to Bitbucket!

While we likely won't be moving away from Docker Hub anytime soon our team would be very interested in npm, nuget, and python package support. We use all 3 of these today across numerous repos and projects; having a centralized system for management - if implemented well - would be very helpful.

Is there an ETA for additional package support?

[Stefan Hirschenberger]

Hi,
I’m wondering why the included storage and traffic quotas don’t seem to depend on the number of users in a workspace.

It feels counterintuitive that a workspace with a single user has the same usage limits as one with 200 users.
Same applies for the general workspace storage limitation.
Could you share the reasoning behind this model?

[Bhavyai Gupta]

A couple of questions: 

1. The included quotas (1–1.5 GB storage and 5–7 GB egress) feel really tight for container images, especially when even a modest set of images can eat through that quickly. Will these allowances scale based on workspace size (e.g. number of users or repos), or is there a way to purchase extra blocks upfront instead of only paying unpredictable overages?

2. Since deletion and garbage collection aren’t available yet, I’m worried about how billing will work once GA arrives. If old or unused images can’t be cleaned up, won’t that unfairly inflate storage bills? Will there be GC-aware billing and maybe some sort of grace period after GA to avoid charging customers for data they can’t yet manage?

[Backend_Dmytro_A]

I’ve tried using Bitbucket Packages in practice, and while the product is still in an early stage, it’s functional and quite promising. However, I’d like to highlight a few important points:

• The included 1.5 GB of storage feels extremely limited for container images — it’s easy to hit that limit very quickly, even for small teams.
• Currently, it’s not possible to delete created registries or remove old images, which makes managing storage difficult. Hopefully, this will be addressed soon.
• There’s also a small UI bug where the registry path shows “%2F” instead of “/” in the documentation, but using “/” works correctly in practice.

Overall, the feature works well for a beta, but better storage management and cleanup capabilities will be essential before GA.

[Gareth.Oakley]

Pricing seems expensive compared to Amazon ECR - especially for data transfer. Whilst this functionality seems nice it's hard to move in this direction when it would cause such a drastic increase in costs for us.

[Ryan Taylor]

I just caught that Bitbucket Packages are only available to folks on the monthly plan. 😲

Will this always be the case, or is this a limitation of the beta?

If this is permanent, this will be a non-starter for my organization; we're on the yearly premium plan and that's the preferred payment cycle for us. I was really excited for this feature but my excitement may be sharply limited if this will remain an option only for monthly subscribers.

[Aaron Christiansen]

Hoping this means an eventual composer and npm registry. 

that being said, the costs are much too expensive to convince the finance guys to go for the switch. 

[Bhavyai Gupta]

I am guessing these guys will bring their costs down once they find that nobody is using it.

[Guðni Már Gilbert]

With the current limitation the feature is dead on arrival for my application. I use a docker container which is ~3GB large. It's a trimmed down version of this 20GB container: https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/docker-image

I was excited to see this feature in your Roadmap :) but the limitations shown in this article are disappointing. 

[Chris Callahan]

Pricing aside, the inability to use repo or workspace level access tokens is a hard stop for us. We do not want to create a "service" user or associate it with a persons account.