Atlassian Bamboo vs. Atlassian Bitbucket

Large companies will find it particularly useful, but smaller companies and independent developers will not be able to afford the cost, and will not see many advantages compared to using an open source solution. However, having some software to handle continuous integration build servers as well as deployments, and doing this consistently between products, is absolutely essential.

Incentivized

As a team we need to push code into the repo on daily basis, Bitbucket has proven that is a reliable and secure server to save and get the code available in no time. The administration part is really easy and there's an extra tool for every developer profile either if you want to use the console or a GUI like Sourcetree.

Incentivized

• Continuous Deployment - you can use Bamboo to automatically build and deploy whenever there are changes in the source code.
• Continuous Integration - by integrating the automated tests and the integration tests before deploying you make sure you know immediately if the latest code fits into the whole scheme of apps.
• Integration with Jira and Bitbucket.
• Flexibility with the program language used for builds: Maven, Ant, PowerShell, any command line tools.

Incentivized

• Free private repositories for small teams - this is great to save costs relative to other options
• They have some robust (although sometimes confusing) team and project management tools
• They have built out many pipeline and integrations, but we did not use these

Incentivized

• Extremely hard barrier to entry for non-backend developers
• Blackbox makes it hard to customize functionality
• The inability to add features without breaking core functionality
• No cloud solution
• Tasks cannot be put in if/else statements
• No clear right way to form build plans

Incentivized

• While it integrates flawlessly with other Atlassian products, it's lacking in 3rd party integrates, especially compared to competitors like GitHub and GitLab
• Using Jira for issues gives a lot of power, but it's also a lot of overhead and complexity that may or may not be necessary for your organization. It also puts issues in another tool, adding a little friction when it comes to addressing issues in your code
• Searching for and discovering other projects and GitHub isn't quite as intuitive or easy to use as competitors

Incentivized

All products have room for improvement. The system improves over time with better and better integrations and I look forward to even more features without paying extra! The system has increased transparency across my organization and with this transparency comes increased throughput on projects. I don't think I can go back to any other system and we are definitely married to this product.

Incentivized

Bamboo offers solid usability for teams looking for an integrated, scalable CI/CD solution, especially those using Atlassian tools. Its interface is intuitive for existing Atlassian users, and its focus on deployment automation makes it a strong option for continuous delivery. However, its complexity and cost may pose challenges for small teams or those new to CI/CD. Overall, Bamboo’s usability shines in environments where ease of integration and streamlined workflows are prioritized. Still, it may require more effort for teams unfamiliar with its setup or without dedicated resources.

Incentivized

The architecture of Bitbucket makes it more easily scalable than other source code management repositories. Also, administration and maintaining the instance is very easy. It integrates with JIRA and other CI/CD applications which makes it more useful to reduce the efforts. It supports multiple plugins and those bring a lot of extra functionality. It increases the overall efficiency and usefulness of Bitbucket.

Incentivized

Support for Bamboo has started lack a little over the years. Atlassian has been moving more towards Bitbucket Pipelines and away from the on-premise install of Bamboo. While the tool is still great, it may take a little bit of time to get a question answered by official support.

The customer support provided by Atlassian (Bitbucket's parent company that also makes Jira, Confluence, etc.) is very helpful. They seem to be very concerned about any issues reported with their products and even just questions about functionality. They are constantly improving the products with new features in nearly every release. Plus they have a plethora of online documentation to reference.

Incentivized

We chose Bamboo over Jenkins for 2 reasons - one, for its tight integration amongst all the products in the tool suite. We find explicit value in the traceability from JIRA issues all the way down to the Bamboo build that was triggered by the check in of those issues. The second reason was for support - we didn't want the burden of figuring out how to support Jenkins in our production environment, as can be the case with so many open source products.

Incentivized

For the features we were looking at, Bitbucket, GitHub and GitLab were all at par and were in a similar price range. We found that GitHub was the most full featured should we need to scale very quickly. GitLab was at par with GitHub for our future needs, but GitHub was a more familiar tool compared to GitLab. Bitbucket won out because of its close integration with Jira and being in the Atlassian family. It was also cheaper than GitHub. As we started with Jira, Bitbucket addition became a natural next step for us. We really liked Bitbucket and stayed with it but we do know we have great options in the form of GitHub and GitLab should we need to scale fast.

Incentivized

• Bamboo was neither very positive or negative. Most of our spend was in man hours on research and development
• We felt it was worth it for larger projects
• Smaller projects had too much setup and run and caused a negative ROI

• The overall return on investment is very high compared to other source code management tools.
• Having a subscription model only is making BitBucket's cost of ownership very high over the years. There should be an alternative option for the purchase of a license permanently (like proprietary software).
• Paying separately for premium support is not a good idea. Premium support should be part of the package itself.
• No local or on-call support available in Singapore and many other countries is also painful. There should be some local presence, at least in their leading market countries like Singapore.

Incentivized