Bitbucket is also quite affordable even if you're not willing to host your own.

Their pricing is different to Github. GH pricing increases with the number of private repositories needed, whereas BB prices based on team members, with unlimited private repositories.

For a small team like ours, with lots of small repositories, it's a no brainer.

Same with us, BitBucket has been absolutely great, I actually like their UI better (just a taste thing).

I find Bitbucket a lot easier to navigate as well. Some stuff in github is really unintuitive until you have used it a few times.

It's the little things that make the difference for me - like being able to restrict pushing to certain branches to either specific people or specific groups, which has saved a lot of accidents.

When you're developing an open source application, though, you need the community of Github. I'm hoping that changes in the future. Not that Github goes away, just that alternatives are equally as viable to build a community around.

Indeed, that and I like it's team -> project -> repository UI a great deal, even though I mostly work alone I can create a team for each client, multiple projects and repositories spread between them.

I've few complaints about bitbucket and when you consider it's still free for me it's insane (I've felt so bad by how much I used it I kinda wish they would charge a few bucks a month sometimes).

I have many small open source projects, so bitbucket (which has unlimited public repositories) is in theory a better fit for these: each project can gets its own repository, vs. having each project in a sub-directory of one repository in github.

Unfortunately, bitbucket lacks some features: their markdown syntax does not allow HTML and they have no views / downloads statistics. The lack of statistics means that their search feature is not so good- no way to sort by popularity.

I'm trying gitlab now: it also doesn't seem to have views/downloads stats. Also the web-site was slow a few days ago.

The lack of statistics is odd: even sourceforge has this.

Well never mind: github does allow unlimited public repositories. I don't know why I thought otherwise.

Yes, my current preference is for Bitbucket, but a large part of that is that I personally prefer Hg to Git. I still eneded up finally making a GitHub account just because so many other projects are hosted there.