What is the main selling point for BitBucket?

Tom Moors

BitBucket offers a hosted Mercurial hosting, combined with commit graphs, issue management, wiki, ... I played with it and it is certainly a great GitHub contender.

However when you are using the whole Atlassian stack, you have the following tools:

- Jira, an awesome issue management tool
- Confluence, a fantastic wiki
- FishEye with Crucible integration to manage and view source code

The thing you need to add yourself: a public Mercurial repository.

So right now, I'm asking what the main target audience/selling point for BitBucket is. Is it placed in the market as an easy introduction to the world of Atlassian? Are there some companies who are using BitBucket to host their code and if so, do you use the other features?

Martin Cooper3

Just to echo Colins point, Bitbucket now and BitBucket in the future may be very different as there is crossover between its offerings and Atlassian's other tools. For instance Bitbucket has its own issue tracker as well as repository browser and wiki so some obvious overlap to Jira, Fisheye and Confluence. But these offerings are not in the same league as the Atlassian counterparts, IMHO.

So the big selling point of bitbucket is you get a complete mercurial backed ALM system setup and hosted for you, in the github, sourceforge style. So you dont need to worry about the integration or setup of multiple tools and can get up and running quickly.

This may be enough for small businesses, individual developers or opensource projects. Enterprises may prefer the feature rich and customisable applications that Atlassians standalone 'point' tools provide.

But still Bitbucket provides the Repository/Version Control Management piece, which is not available in the other Atlassian tools; Fisheye is a read only browser, Crucible is a code review tool and there is nothing to actually manage the creation and usage of your mercurial repository.

So whilst greater integration to BitBucket may come, it has its own place in the market.

If you are interesed in a Mercurial management tool, that has good integration to Jira and works alongside Fisheye/Crucible, then AgileSCM from Clearvision may be of interest, see here for details:

http://www.clearvision-cm.com/agilescm.html