What's the difference between a private workspace and a public one?

[Ahmad Atiyah]

When creating a private workspace in BB Cloud, does that mean only I can access that workspace? And if it was public, do users from outside the organization have access to that workspace?

[seanaty]

From what I gather the difference is a private workspace won't show any public directory of public repositories.

I think this is a very oft-forgotten feature of Bitbucket but if you go to bitbucket.org/<workspace> in an incognito window (e.g. you're an unauthenticated member of the general public) then Bitbucket will display a list of the company's public repositories. It's a way for companies to showcase their open source projects similar to Github.

If you opt to have your workspace private you'll see a snarky message instead of a list of public repositories. Keep in mind this doesn't actually control any access to repositories whatsoever. It merely controls the absence/presence of your workspaces public repositories. Setting a workspace to private will not make any repositories private.