Bitbucket Server (discontinued) vs. Perforce P4

Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash) is suitable for departments or teams with the capacity to manage and support their own products and the availability to implement the tool on their own infrastructure. Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash) enables a good framework based on git to integrate the development cycle and to handle anything from a minor group of users and repositories to an extended usage with multiple users and roles collaborating in different projects.

Incentivized

For large-scale codebases with fixed and regular releases that do not follow a continuous delivery paradigm, Perforce is certainly well suited. In projects that are small and distinctly separated from other discrete (though potentially dependent) units, the benefits of the Perforce tool may not be as clear of a victor over other systems.

Incentivized

• Projects & Permissions - Stash keeps you and your developers productive by providing a way to structure your repositories and manage permissions via a simple, yet powerful user interface. Stash is very easy to use, manage & administer.
• Essentially Stash gives two versions of interfaces to work with.
• Stash Repository hosted on a server.
• Atlassian SourceTree.
• Atlassian Sourcetree is a tool to work with a code in stash. The two 'web' and 'desktop' versions make working with code user friendly, intuitive and comprehensive.
• Connectivity to JIRA - Stash keeps track of all issues associated with commits. Users can use Stash to quickly see all issues associated with a commit, or use the Source tab on JIRA issues for an aggregate view of all the code changes that are related to a specific JIRA issue. With this information available, your development team saves time when tracking particular bug fixes or improvements.

Incentivized

• Merge algorithm is smart and utilizing the visual interface to do merges makes them easier to digest.
• Easy to set up on multiple platforms and architectures and is well supported on all of them.
• Visual interface has many tools and customization options that help to optimize and personalize workflow.

Incentivized

• You can't allow users to create new repositories without them being full admins of a whole project
• There's not a way to limit who can merge a pull request (e.g. allow only the author to merge) outside of branch permissions
• Some settings like default reviewers can't be easily copied to different repositories (without setting default reviewers at the project level, which we don't want to do because a single project has multiple team's code under it)

Incentivized

• I was having a hard time learning it. Even if you are an experienced developer, there is some learning curve.
• Can be slow when working with large data sets at once.
• When working on multiple workspaces on the same machine, Perforce can make it difficult not to mess up the code.

Because we're so locked in, it's likely we'll be using Bitbucket Server for a while, unfortunately.

Incentivized

We have a need to consolidate into a single package, and have such a large variety of technical proficiency among our users that Perforce seems less suitable. Many would like to remain using it, however, even those who use Perforce are the minority, and are often limited to our development teams.

Incentivized

The usability of its interface is pretty straight forward when it comes to creating projects and repositories, but when you have to dive into finer grained portions of the UI things can get tricky. If you are used to using tools like GitHub or Gitlab -- Bitbucket is just different enough to be a bother.

Incentivized

With Perforce Helix, you can use it via the command line, via P4V, or any of the other APIs included with the product. It is extremely easy for new users to get up and running. Users of Perforce Helix only have to pull in the files of interest to them. Also, Perforce is very easy to script and integrate into your CI/CD pipeline. Streams allows you to have pinpoint control of your workflow, and P4Search is the absolute best--I wish Perforce (the company) would talk more about this. It is absolutely fabulous!

Incentivized

In our large environment, Perforce is rarely "down". We have regular maintenance windows and from time to time Perforce can feel a little slow, but its always available. Tech support has always worked with our engineers and IT department to make sure that any real performance or stability issues are addressed quickly.

Incentivized

Never really needed any support as the application is very easy to set up and maintain. Any questions we had were well documented in their online documentation, and community forum.

Incentivized

I had two representatives from Perforce contact me after downloading it but never responded when I had questions. I also had a difficult time finding good training material for getting started. There is a lot of available support material when running into issues, though, because of how many large companies use it.

Incentivized

This rating is related to setting up an environment from an existing Perforce repository. Initial setup of Perforce as the repository for the company was done by a separate team long prior to my inception.

Incentivized

We migrated several of our applications to BitBucket from legacy Team Foundation Server, and the experience has been significantly better. It's easy to use and plenty flexible. Other solutions such as GitHub are also good, but we needed to keep everything on-prem due to constraints around our industry and company, though we are currently re-evaluating whether we can move to something cloud based in the future.

Incentivized

New users of Perforce Helix can be up and running in less than thirty minutes. It is easy to use, but also very powerful. Bitbucket is slow, prone to outages, and (for large teams) requires a team of dedicated administrators. I've had request for information from Bitbucket that requires hours to pull together that would take me less than 30 seconds in Perforce Helix. Large file storage in Bitbucket is clunky and requires you to jump through too many hoops. It's not even something you have to think about with Perforce Helix, as you are only limited by your OS. Perforce Helix is very easy to use even for non-developers. I wouldn't dare ask a non-developer to store their documentation in Bitbucket.

Incentivized

• In positive form, having Stash over not having it at all has provided us with a superior repository system over trying to push to some local server instance and manage branches/merging from our local machines.
• There are no real negatives to using Stash, its only problem is that there are competitors out there that can offer additional features.

Incentivized

• Locking assets make us have no merge problems which are harder to manage on other versions control without locking
• Almost no need to give support to artists or non-tech folks because the operations are very straightforward
• There's no way to do interim checkins without going to the process of creating a stream

Incentivized