Comparison of open source software hosting facilities

A source code repository or source code escrow is a file archive and web hosting facility where large amounts of source code are kept, either publicly or privately. They are often used by open source projects and other multi-developer projects to handle various versions and developers submitting various patches of code in an organized fashion. Often these web sites support version control, bug tracking, release management, mailing lists, and wiki based documentation.

Below follows a comparison of open source code repositories.

Contents

Overview

Features

[A definition of what is meant by each of these attributes/features would be welcome for clarity.]

Name Code hosting Code review Bug tracking Web hosting Wiki Translation system Shell server Mailing List Forum Personal branch Private branch Announce Build system Team Countries blocked Other features
Alioth Yes No Yes Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No Sample Code, Help Wanted, Anonymous FTP
Assembla Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes[1] Yes Yes Yes FTP, Time Tracking, API
BerliOS Yes ? Yes Yes Yes ? Yes Yes Yes ? ? Yes[2] ? ? FTP, MySQL
BetterCodes Yes No Yes Yes No No No No No Yes Yes Yes No Yes OpenID, Files Upload, Social Network
Bitbucket Yes Yes[3] Yes Yes[n 1] Yes No No No No Yes Yes[n 2] No No Yes OpenID
CodePlex Yes No Yes No Yes No No Yes Yes No No No No No Windows Live ID
GitHub Yes[n 3] Yes[4] Yes[5] Yes Yes No No No No Yes Yes[n 3] No No Yes Public API,[6] static web-page hosting[7]
Gitorious Yes Yes No No Yes No No No No Yes No No No Yes OpenID[n 4]
GNU Savannah Yes Yes[8] Yes Yes No No Yes Yes No[9] No No Yes No Yes Free software code base
Google Code Yes Yes Yes Yes[n 5] Yes No No Yes[n 5] No Yes[n 6] No No No No Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria[10]
JavaForge Yes Yes[11] Yes Yes Yes No No No Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Public remote API, Document management
java.net Yes ? Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
KnowledgeForge Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Written in Python. All code open source.
Launchpad Yes Yes Yes No No Yes No Yes No Yes Yes[n 7] Yes Yes[n 8] Yes Blueprints, Karma, Answer, Mail interface, public API, OpenID Provider, Download area, Non-project branch, this is opensource
openSUSE Build Service No No Yes[n 5] No No No No No No No No No Yes [n 9] No public API
OSOR.eu Yes No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No No ? No ? Metrics, OSS Observatory, Communities, Webconference – only for projects sponsored by public administrators (or specific interest for)
Project Kenai Yes[n 10] No Yes[n 11] No Yes[n 12] No No Yes[n 10] Yes[n 10] Yes Yes No No No Download area, IM Chatroom, public API, project website, extensive help, code can be hidden
RepositoryHosting.com Yes No Yes No Yes No No No Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Trac hosting, free backups to S3, Agile tools, project blog, WebDAV shared drives
SourceForge Yes No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes No Yes Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria[12] Help Wanted, OpenID Relying Party, Download area
tigris.org Yes No Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No ? public API, extensive help
Transifex No No No No No Yes No No No No No No No Yes Translation service, runs on open-source software.
Name Code hosting Code review Bug tracking Web hosting Wiki Translation system Shell server Mailing List Forum Personal branch Private branch Announce Build system Team Countries blocked Other features

Available version control systems, more features

Name CVS SVN Bazaar Microsoft TFS Arch Git Mercurial Bounties Runs on all free software Online Support Manager Established notes
Alioth Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No Yes No Debian Project 2003 Preference for Debian related projects.
Assembla No Yes No No No Yes Yes No No[n 13] Yes Assembla, LLC 2 GB Free. Ticket Tool. Wiki. Scrum Reports. Trac.
BerliOS Yes Yes No No No Yes[13] Yes[14] No ? ? FOKUS[15] Funded by German government until 2011. Will be transfered to non-profit association[16]
Betavine Yes Yes No No No No No No ? ? Vodafone 2007
Bitbucket No No No No No Yes Yes ? No Yes Atlassian 2008 Free plan has unlimited public repos and unlimited 5 user private repos; basic issue-tracking; visualizations; wiki
BountySource No Yes No No No No No Yes ? ? Bounty Source Inc. late 2003 Allows monetary bounties on tasks. Custom CMS and SVN browser.
CodePlex No Yes No Yes No No Yes No No ? Microsoft May 2006
Dynamsoft TFS Hosting No No No Yes No No No No No Yes Dynamsoft Dec 2011
Freepository No Yes No No No No No No ? ? 1999 Provides free and paid accounts. Free accounts have web access only.
GitHub No yes (experimental git-svn bridge) No No No Yes No No No Yes GitHub, Inc April 2008 Git Hosting. Free for open source, paid for private.
Gitorious No No No No No Yes No No Yes Yes Shortcut AS January 2008 Git Hosting. Free for open source projects.
GNU Savannah Yes Yes Yes[17] No Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Savannah Administration Project by the Free Software Foundation.
Google Code No Yes No No No Yes Yes No No Yes[n 14] Google 27 July 2006
JavaForge Yes Yes No No No Yes Yes No No Yes Intland Software 2005 Free. For open source projects only.
KnowledgeForge No Yes No No No Yes Yes No Yes Yes Appropriate Software Foundation and Open Knowledge Foundation 2005 Associates VCS and Trac project services.
Launchpad Import only Import only Yes No No Import only[18] Import only[19] No Yes Yes[20] Canonical Ltd. 2005 CVS, Git, SVN are imported to Bazaar format.
OSOR.eu No Yes No No No No No No Yes Yes European Commission October 2008 Launched by The European Commission. Collaboration with national/local forges.
OW2 Consortium Yes Yes No No No No No No ? ? OW2 Consortium Merger of ObjectWeb and Orientware; oriented on middleware technology.
Project Kenai No Yes No No No Yes Yes No No Yes Oracle Corporation October 2008
RepositoryHosting.com No Yes No No No Yes Yes No Yes Yes Repository Hosting LLC January 2009 Unlimited projects and users, and 2GB, for $6 per month. $1 per month for each additional GB.
SEUL.org Yes Yes No No No No No No ? ? May 1997
SourceForge Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Yes No No[21] Yes[22] Geeknet, Inc. (Formerly VA Software) November 1999
Tigris.org Yes Yes No No No No No No ? ? (community) 2000 Restricted to collaborative software development tools.
Name CVS SVN Bazaar Microsoft TFS Arch Git Mercurial Bounties Runs on all free software Online Support Manager Established notes

Popularity

Name Users Projects Teams Branches Bug Reports Prominent projects Alexa rank (lower=better)
Alioth &1000000000001033400000010,334[23] &10000000000000899000000899[23] – – ? SANE N/A (subdomain not tracked)
Assembla &10000000000300000000000300,000[24] &1000000000006000000000060,000+[25] &100000000000010000000001,000+[26] ? ? Gfire, GXUnit, Hikarunix, HippoMocks, MadSwatter, SnakeYAML &100000000000066210000006,621[27]
BerliOS &1000000000004728500000047,285[28] &100000000000054480000005,448[28] – – – aMule, avidemux, SuperTux, LinCityNG &1000000000001722800000017,228[29]
Bitbucket &10000000000170000000000170,000+[30] &1000000000005660900000056,609[31] – – – OGRE, TortoiseHG, Codeigniter, TrinityCore, Aldrin, Pylons, Sphinx &1000000000001336600000013,366[32]
BountySource ?[n 15] &100000000000013010000001,301[33] – – – &100000000014276140000001,427,614[34]
CodePlex &10000000000151782000000151,782 &1000000000001595500000015,955[35] – – ? Rawr, AJAX Control Toolkit, Silverlight Toolkit, BlogEngine.NET, IronPython, SharpMap &100000000000023120000002,312[36]
GitHub &100000000010551790000001,055,179[37]

&10000000000885030000000885,030[38] Public non-forks. &10000000000472480000000472,480[39] Public forks. &100000000012854020000001,285,402[40] Gists. &100000000029705710000002,970,571[37] Total.1

 – ? – Ruby on Rails, IronRuby, jQuery, Moodle, Diaspora &100000000000010840000001,084[41]
Gitorious ?[n 15] &100000000000083360000008,336[42] ? ? – Qt, MeeGo &1000000000002805400000028,054[43]
GNU Savannah &1000000000005372700000053,727[44] &100000000000033840000003,384[44] – – &1000000000003131200000031,312[44] Most GNU projects (including Emacs), QEMU &10000000000100000000000100,000[45] (approximation)
Google Code ?[n 15] &10000000000250000000000250,000+[46] – – ? Google Gears, Inferno, Android, Chromium &100000000000010000000001,000[47] (approximation)
KnowledgeForge.net &100000000000010030000001,003[48] &10000000000000246000000246[48] &1000000000000005700000057 ? ? KForge, CKAN, DomainModel &100000000012336110000001,233,611[49]
Launchpad &100000000014217870000001,421,787[50] &1000000000002474200000024,742[51] &1000000000001114800000011,148[50] &10000000000428269000000428,269[52] &10000000000784839000000784,839[53] Ubuntu, MySQL (code hosting), BlueBream (Zope 3) (bug tracking), Inkscape, Bazaar, GNOME Do, Drizzle, Launchpad, Enlightenment, LiVES (translations) &1000000000001077200000010,772[54]
Project Kenai &1000000000007560800000075,608[55] &1000000000001795800000017,958[56] Sun Cloud APIs, JRuby, Alice &1000000000005302300000053,023[57]
SourceForge &100000000020000000000002,000,000+[58] &10000000000432004000000432,004[59] – – &100000000028729580000002,872,958 in the tracker2 database (i.e. trac and other offerings not counted) Inkscape (download hosting), LAME, MinGW, Poedit, 7-Zip, Fluxbox, Audacity, ffdshow, EMule, FileZilla, phpMyAdmin, LiVES &10000000000000132000000132[60]
Tigris.org ?[n 15] &10000000000000684000000684  ?  ? &10000000000143800000000143,800 Subversion,[n 16] Subclipse, TortoiseSVN, RapidSVN, Scarab, ArgoUML, SubEtha, eyebrowse, midgard, cowiki, antelope, scons, frameworkx, build-interceptor, phing, maxq, aut, current, ReadySET, GEF, Axion, Style, SSTree &1000000000001017300000010,173[61]
Name Users Projects Teams Branches Bug Reports Prominent projects Alexa rank (lower=better)

Note 1: GitHub Blog: Those are some big numbers. The number of non-forks and forks were taken from searches done in a logged out session, so only public repositories are included. The last public gist number is a good estimate of total gists, since all gists, public or private, are numbered sequentially.

Specific requirements

Name Ad-free CVS SVN Arch Git notes
Drupal Yes No No No Yes Only for Drupal related projects.
freedesktop.org Yes No No No Yes X.Org, cairo (graphics), and other Linux desktop infrastructure projects.
Gna! Yes Yes Yes Yes No Only for FSF-recognized free software projects.
KnowledgeForge.net Yes No Yes No Yes Primarily for Open Knowledge related projects.
JavaForge Yes Yes Yes No Yes Primarily for Java related projects. Plugins available for Eclipse and NetBeans
java.net Yes Yes Yes No No Primarily for Java related projects.
LuaForge Yes Yes No No Only for Lua related projects. Repository migrated to GitHub [62]
mozdev Yes Yes No No Only for Mozilla related projects.
Openmoko Yes Yes Yes No No Only for Openmoko related projects
RubyForge Yes Yes Yes No Yes Only for Ruby related projects
SEUL.org Yes Yes Yes No Only for projects licensed under a DFSG-compatible license.
Ourproject.org Yes Yes Yes No No For free software, free culture and free knowledge projects.
OSOR.eu Yes No Yes No No Only for Free and open source software by/made/for public administrations.[63]
Name Ad-free CVS SVN Arch Git notes

See also

Notes

  1. ^ per account not per project, see Free hosting of e.g. documentation
  2. ^ private branch limited to 5 users on free plan, see Pricing and plans — bitbucket.org
  3. ^ a b "soft limit" of 300MB to prevent abuse, see Pricing — GitHub
  4. ^ site is open source, see Gitorious' code on Gitorious
  5. ^ a b c outside
  6. ^ mercurial only
  7. ^ Currently only available for security vulnerability updates
  8. ^ Ubuntu
  9. ^ SUSE, Debian, Red Hat, Mandriva, Ubuntu
  10. ^ a b c max 5
  11. ^ max 2
  12. ^ max 1
  13. ^ is "open but not free"
  14. ^ Developers of Google Code's project hosting service are responsive in the discussion group and in the issue tracker.
  15. ^ a b c d Data not available.]
  16. ^ Bug tracking only, as a legacy service after the Subversion project migrated to the Apache Software Foundation.

References

  1. ^ Pricing/Plans — assembla.com
  2. ^ http://developer.berlios.de/
  3. ^ — Using Mercurial Queues And Bitbucket.org
  4. ^ Fork Queue — GitHub
  5. ^ GitHub Issue Tracker — GitHub
  6. ^ GitHub API docs
  7. ^ GitHub pages
  8. ^ From Savannah's Maintenance Docs, How To Get Your Project Approved Quickly: "The review we do can be lengthy and difficult for both the submitter and the reviewer. Be sure to follow these steps; if your project doesn't comply with our requirements, we will ask you to make changes to your project or register again. This ensures a level of quality for projects hosted at Savannah, and even more important, raises awareness of these legal and philosophical issues related to free software."
  9. ^ From Savannah's documentation, this feature is deprecated. See [1]
  10. ^ Google Project Hosting – Google Code. Code.google.com (2006-07-20). Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  11. ^ Integrator Workflow: Pull Requests - codeBeamer Knowledge Base
  12. ^ Terms_of_Use - sitelegal. Sourceforge.net (2009-10-19). Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  13. ^ News, BerliOS Project (2008-07-05), BerliOS provides GIT Source Control Management, http://developer.berlios.de/forum/forum.php?forum_id=29964, retrieved 2008-12-10 
  14. ^ News, BerliOS Project (2008-07-05), BerliOS provides Mercurial (HG) Source Control Management, http://developer.berlios.de/forum/forum.php?forum_id=29963, retrieved 2008-12-10 
  15. ^ BerliOS – The Open Source Mediator
  16. ^ helix (2011-10-31). "BerliOS continues - non-profit association is founded". Project: BerliOS - Neuigkeiten. BerliOS. http://developer.berlios.de/forum/forum.php?forum_id=37533. 
  17. ^ Savannah Support Request, sr #106417 (2008-10-24), Bazaar on Savannah, http://savannah.gnu.org/support/?106417, retrieved 2008-12-10 
  18. ^ Launchpad supports Git imports.
  19. ^ Accessing Git, Subversion and Mercurial from Bazaar.
  20. ^ Web help, email support, and IRC support.
  21. ^ SourceForge.net: An Open Forge
  22. ^ SourceForge.net: Site Support
  23. ^ a b Alioth: Welcome
  24. ^ Assembla: Home
  25. ^ "Assembla integrates with Basecamp and offers workspaces and portfolios for distributed agile development teams". 37signals. March 6, 2009. http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2009/03/assembla-integrates-with-basecamp-and-offers-workspaces-and-portfolios-for-distributed-agile-develop.html. 
  26. ^ "Assembla – Quick Review". JohnyCoder. August 7, 2008. http://johnnycoder.com/blog/2008/08/07/assembla-accelerating-software-development/. 
  27. ^ Assembla.com Site Info. Alexa.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  28. ^ a b BerliOS Developer Portal
  29. ^ Berlios.de Site Info. Alexa.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  30. ^ bitbucket blog
  31. ^ Repository List
  32. ^ Bitbucket.org Site Info. Alexa.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  33. ^ Project list, Bounty Source
  34. ^ Bountysource.com Site Info. Alexa.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  35. ^ CodePlex – CodePlex – Project Directory
  36. ^ Codeplex.com Site Info. Alexa.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  37. ^ a b GitHub Home Page. Retrieved on 2011-10-13.
  38. ^ GitHub Search non-fork repositories. Retrieved on 2011-10-13.
  39. ^ GitHub Search fork repositories. Retrieved on 2011-10-13.
  40. ^ GitHub Gist. Retrieved on 2011-10-13.
  41. ^ Github.com Site Info. Alexa.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  42. ^ Projects. Gitorious.org. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  43. ^ Gitorious.org Site Info. Alexa.com (2009-10-28). Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  44. ^ a b c Statistics - Savannah. gnu.org. Retrieved 2011-09-30.
  45. ^ Nongnu.org Site Info. Alexa.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  46. ^ Rosenberg, Jonathan (December 21, 2009). "The meaning of open". Official Google blog.
  47. ^ Google.com Site Info. Alexa.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  48. ^ a b KnowledgeForge.net Home Page
  49. ^ Knowledgeforge.net Site Info. Alexa.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  50. ^ a b People and teams in Launchpad. launchpad.net. Retrieved 2011-09-30.
  51. ^ Projects registered in Launchpad. launchpad.net. Retrieved 2011-09-30
  52. ^ Launchpad Code. launchpad.net. Retrieved 2011-09-30.
  53. ^ Launchpad Bugs. launchpad.net. Retrieved 2011-09-30.
  54. ^ Launchpad.net Site Info. Alexa.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  55. ^ People — Project Kenai. projectkenai.com. Retrieved 2011-09-30.
  56. ^ Projects — Project Kenai. projectkenai.com. Retrieved 2011-09-30.
  57. ^ Kenai.com Site Info. Alexa.com (2010-08-28). Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  58. ^ "What is SourceForge.net?" sourceforge.net.
  59. ^ "Project search". sourceforge.net. Retrieved on 2011-07-18.
  60. ^ Sourceforge.net Site Info. Alexa.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  61. ^ Tigris.org Site Info. Alexa.com. Retrieved on 2010-11-26.
  62. ^ "LuaForge Migration FAQ". luaforge.net. Retrieved 2011-09-30.
  63. ^ OSOR.eu Ten Principles

External links