10 reasons why teams are switching from GitHub to Bitbucket after Microsoft acquisition
By Claire Maynard on June 4, 2018After the announcement of Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub, Bitbucket started to see a spike in the number of GitHub users migrating their repositories to Bitbucket. Why? Many users understand they can get everything they had on GitHub in Bitbucket plus more, and at a lower cost. Tens of thousands of customers – including 60 of Fortune 100 – turn to Bitbucket as their code collaboration solution.

Start migrating from GitHub to Bitbucket
10 reasons why teams are moving from GitHub to Bitbucket Cloud
1. Price
Teams can save 4x the cost moving from GitHub to Bitbucket. For example, if you are a team of 10 on GitHub, you have to pay $205 a month, while on Bitbucket you’re only paying $50. Bitbucket also offers free public and private repositories for teams with less than 5 users. GitHub doesn’t offer a free plan for users who want private repositories. On GitHub, even an individual developer has to pay $7 a month.

Time to move to BitBucket 😂😂 https://t.co/Yi7BrJUoh4
— Anup Khanal (@anup756) June 4, 2018
2. Superior integration with Jira
It’s been known for a long time that one of the best benefits of using Bitbucket is it’s best-in-class integration with Jira – the worlds number 1 agile software development tool for teams.
GitHub has an integration too, but check out all the things you can do with Bitbucket and Jira that you can’t do with GitHub:
- Create branches directly from Jira issues and start coding quickly. Nope, you can’t do that with GitHub.
- Interact with Jira issues without leaving Bitbucket. View, edit, comment or transition Jira issues inside Bitbucket’s UI. You can even add attachments to issues from Bitbucket. Nope, GitHub can’t do that either.
- Automatically connect commits, branches, and pull requests to Jira issues by adding the Jira issue key in the commit message. You can even require Jira issue keys in your commits so all of your work stays organized.
- Connecting Bitbucket and Jira only takes 30 seconds.

Yup. We’ve deleted our #Github profile. You’re probably going to find us on @Bitbucket in the future.
RIP @github
— KUBIC Studio (@KubicStudio) June 4, 2018
3. Built-in Continuous Integration and Delivery
On Bitbucket, you get a built in CI/CD solution that is unified with your source code. There are no CI servers to set up, user management to configure or repositories to synchronize. Just enable it within the UI and you’re done. What about with GitHub? Nope. GitHub doesn’t have a CI/CD solution. You have to go through the headache of finding, installing, configuring a new tool, setting up all your users over again, and you don’t benefit from the end-to-end visibility because all your CI information lives in a separate tool.

Bitbucket Pipelines is just magical. feels so logical to have CI with Version Control. Huge reason to choose Bitbucket over Github
— Prashant Deva (@pdeva) June 3, 2018
4. Bitbucket comes with Trello
This means the moment you set up a Bitbucket account, you get a Trello board – the fastest, easiest way to organize your projects, connect your work to code, and ship software, all for free.

<imports projects to @Bitbucket>
<deletes GitHub account> pic.twitter.com/Od00XGwlUc— Damiano Febbrarino (@dfebbrarino) June 4, 2018
5. SOC 2 Type II Compliance
With SOC 2 Type II compliance for both Jira Software and Bitbucket, the availability and security of your code is guaranteed. All the benefits of working in the cloud is now matched with an industry-first level of security, confidentiality, and availability for both your work and your code. Nah, GitHub is not SOC 2 Type II compliant.
Looks like I’ll be moving to @Bitbucket after @Microsoft bought @github
— /home/$USER #FreeTommy (@init3_) June 4, 2018
6. Seamless integrations within the UI
Bitbucket Connect allows any developer to build deep integrations within the product UI in Bitbucket Cloud. You can stay within one tool to build and ship your software meaning no more context-switching between tools and tasks to get stuff done.
I use Bitbucket and it is awesome! I have been using Atlassian Tools for quite sometime and I like them.
— Sambit (@sambit19) June 4, 2018
7. Code aware search
Semantic search that does the grunt work for you. Code aware search analyzes your code syntax, ensuring definitions matching your search term are prioritized over usages and variable names. With GitHub, you don’t get smart sorting and could spend hours finding what you need.
This weekend will be dedicated to moving all my stuff from github to bitbucket.
— Manish Gupta (@manishpedia) June 4, 2018
8. Mercurial Support
Bitbucket Cloud has Mercurial support. Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management system like Git. Have the freedom of choice and use the distributed version control system that works for you. GitHub? Nope.
So now that Github is practically dead we can all agree that Mercurial is better anyhow and move to Bitbucket, yes?
— Tobias A. Franke (@thefranke) June 4, 2018
9. Great for Open source projects too
Think GitHub is the answer for open source projects? Did you know Bitbucket also offers free public repos as well and hosts several large open source projects?
- TortoiseHg
- Ogre3d
- PyPI
- Unity
- Pidgin
bitbucket is pretty great and unlike github doesn’t force your repositories to be public (for small teams).
— renderhjs (@renderhjs) June 4, 2018
10. Using Slack?
With the Bitbucket bot for Slack, teams can take action from their channel – merge, comment, and even nudge reviewers on pull requests. With the Bitbucket Stride integration, you can “poke” people reviewing your PR as well. Nah, GitHub doesn’t have that either.

Please remember that #github isn’t the only git repository out there. Today I will mostly be using Bitbucket.
I have been doing so (for this project) for the past year and a half
The project I was working on before this is also in Bitbucket— Peter Fisher (@pfwd) June 4, 2018
Are you self-hosting? Here are six reasons teams choose Bitbucket Server:
1. Price
Our enterprise offering, Bitbucket Data Center, is 4x less expensive than GitHub Enterprise. For an engineering organization of 100 on GitHub Enterprise, you’ll pay $25,000 for a year. Bitbucket Data Center costs a fraction at $6000.

Welp!, time to move all my crap over to @Bitbucket I guess.
So long and thanks for all the fish @github
— Geri (@gerino_m) June 4, 2018
2. Native integration with Jira
It’s been known for a long time that one of the best benefits of using Bitbucket is it’s best-in-class integration with Jira – the worlds number 1 agile software development tool for teams. GitHub has an integration too, but check out all the things you can do with Bitbucket and Jira that you can’t do with GitHub:
- Create branches directly from a Jira issue and start coding quickly. Nope, you can’t do that with GitHub.

- Interact with Jira issues without leaving Bitbucket. View, create, comment or transition Jira issues inside Bitbucket’s UI. You can’t do that with GitHub either.

- Automatically connect commits, branches, and pull requests to Jira issues by adding the Jira issue key in the commit message. You can even require Jira issue keys in your commits so nothing get’s lost. Then, use Jira query language to find important development details – for example, search for all Jira issues with the status of “commit”.
- Best part of all, connecting Bitbucket and Jira only takes 30 seconds.
Switch to BitBucket instead? pic.twitter.com/cqWY2c3FGx
— Rocktek Digital (@RocktekDev) June 3, 2018
3. Bitbucket has better mirroring
GitHub Enterprise finally added mirroring Git repositories across different geographic locations, but can it keep up with Bitbucket Data Center? Select which projects are mirrored in a geographic location and Bitbucket will automatically sync and inherit user permissions. GitHub mirrors every repository, creating a bottleneck when pushing changes out.
Yes I suppose thats why lots of big companies use BitBucket
— Roy Derks (@gethackteam) June 4, 2018
4. Customizable pull request workflows
Bitbucket allows you to choose between five different merge strategies, create (and require) custom merge conditions, and configure default reviewers. GitHub expects you to use GitHub flow and be happy about it.
5. Superior extensibility
The Atlassian Marketplace houses over 200 Bitbucket Server compatible apps and more than 140 for Bitbucket Data Center. GitHub has 50. Not only do we offer more apps, but you also get access to the self-hosted Bitbucket’s source code. You’ll have to keep your GitHub representative on speed-dial for similar access.
those of us who use bitbucket are enjoying not being filled with panic and uncertainty today.
— Grant Horwood ⬋⬋⬋ (@gbhorwood) June 3, 2018
6. Turnkey active-active clustering
And i hope you’re ready for massive network traffic, because we are all coming for YOU…
— dontbe (@dontbeoriginal) June 4, 2018
Start migrating from GitHub to Bitbucket

