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Stash vs Alternatives?

Ishan De Silva _Personal_

Hi,

My company is evaluating Stash at the moment. We are using Git (and Gitolite) to manage all our source code. As we are long time users of Jira, Stash's native integration with Jira is a plus, but is there any place where I can find a comparison between Stash and it's alternatives (GitHub, GitLab, Gitolite etc)

All the discussion on Stash I came across so far (here and here) seem to be an year or two old and are comparing a quite early version of Stash. Also, has Atlassian answered the woes mentioned here?

Thanks,

Ishan.

Accepted answers

Kelly Schoenhofen

Yes, I think Atlassian and the Marketplace have answered most/all of the woes listed in your link https://gist.github.com/ceejbot/6322643.

Many of the "woes" the author goes on about are just silly. I view Github as a lightweight Stash missing many features, not the other way around. Either out of the box or with plugins from the Atlassian marketplace, I don't think there's anything in their list that hasn't been addressed/isn't yet avaiable for Stash.

Many of the points in your url are either from comparing an early version of Stash to Github, or insufficient knowledge of Stash. However, the pricing comparison is a straight-up joke - comparing 50 user Github license vs a 500 user license for Stash? Alright - two can play at that game:

One requirement we had was LDAP/Active Directory integration with Git. Stash has that (we actually use Jira as our user directory for Stash; Jira is integrated with AD).

A 500 user Stash license is $12k purchase, $6k maintenance a year. Github Enterprise (what you need to do LDAP/Active Directory authentication) for 500 users is $125,000 a year. (https://enterprise.github.com/pricing)

So keep that in mind during your comparison - Github is 20X as expensive as Stash.

-Kelly Schoenhofen

All comments

Contact Kintosoft

What about Gitblit? It is a pure Java Gitblit server and web client.

I've just started a new project to create a new JIRA add-on in order to automatically deploy Gitblit on JIRA fully integrated out-of-the-box. Similar to Subversion ALM, but for Git this time.

In this way, JIRA will become a powerful Git server with a single click by installing the add-on from the Marketplace.

Kelly Schoenhofen

Yes, I think Atlassian and the Marketplace have answered most/all of the woes listed in your link https://gist.github.com/ceejbot/6322643.

One requirement we had was LDAP/Active Directory integration with Git. Stash has that (we actually use Jira as our user directory for Stash; Jira is integrated with AD).

So keep that in mind during your comparison - Github is 20X as expensive as Stash.

-Kelly Schoenhofen

Ishan De Silva _Personal_

@Kelly

Yes, I agree with you that most of the "woes" mentioned in the link I quoted are silly.

I was mainly hoping to find a side-by-side comparison of Stash features against the alternatives, but thanks for your answer.

Kelly Schoenhofen

Yeah, I wish there was one. The feature set of Stash (and others) are evolving so quickly, anything beyond the broadest feature matrix would be out of date and misleading within weeks, if not days. I just noticed Stash 2.11 came out today, and it adds commit commenting and file commenting, which I think Github has had and is frequently referenced in comparisons. Until now, the only way you could comment on a change was during a pull request.

Andrew Milne

One thing I would mention about Github is that it's sold as a black box that you have little access to (VM image) and the backup solution was attrocious (ssh in to machine and run scripts that print the entire backup to terminal that you can then redirect to file). How they can claim that as an enterprise level product I don't know. Stash's backup clients, while still realtivly new, are much more user friendly.

(source: https://enterprise.github.com/help/articles/backing-up-your-installation)

I also found Stash's organisation of projects and repositories more suitable for enterprise than GitHub which appears to be more targeted at open source style comunity projects.

Your other big option is Gitorious. I wasn't a fan of it last year based on a pretty terrible UI and truly lousy product documentation. It looks like the UI may have improved since then, don't know about the docs.

You can also piece together something from smaller components such as gitolite and gerrit, but I found the lack of integration disapointing and made things harder to use.

Based on my evaluation we purchased a Stash enterprise license and we've been very happy with it. Atlassian are especially good at releasing incremental improvements and bug fixes.

If you've got Jira I'd consider the tight Stash integration a major plus, especially if your doing agile with Greenhopper/Jira Agile an want to use Jira to control branching.

Kelly Schoenhofen

We drink all the flavors of Atlassian Kool-Aid where I work - Stash has been a natural fit with our use of Bamboo, Fisheye/Crucible, and Jira.

We have a strong requirement around security - no non-AD accounts, no open access to our source code even inside our network, etc. You can generate single-repo ssh access keys between Fisheye & Stash, so you don't need an embedded account.

Some of the "neat" things between Stash & Jira are also available I assume with Github & Jira, like being able to create feature branches from Jira. That's been a big help too - if Developer Mary is assigned issue ABC-123 Create Purple Widget, she can create the feature branch in Jira, and it will create a branch called Feature/ABC-123_Create_Purple_Widget right in Stash. It seems trivial, but it's been the difference between a 1% user of feature branches and a 99% use of feature branches.

I've been fairly happy with Stash. Our prior git server was a gitosis "thing", and it was difficult to manage, and I was absolutely clueless how to upgrade it. Stash has been a very different beast; very easy to upgrade and there's almost always features in the frequent releases that the userbase has been asking for.