I've used plenty of other options- we even ran an internal GitLab instance prior to moving to BitBucket at my last company. Atlassian's suite of products are a safe bet because they're generally good products.

I like the GitLab feature set more than BitBucket but when I went started my own company it was generally cheaper for my team of 5-8 to use hosted JIRA, BitBucket, and Confluence then it would be for me to pay AWS/Rackspace/Azure/Digital Ocean to run the F/OSS equivalents in our cloud environment. BitBucket integrates just fine with Jenkins and the new Project organization was much needed.

We may someday move to GitLab or something else, but there isn't anything wrong with choosing Atlassian in any way. It's not like they're an Oracle/SAP type company that just abuses their customers and has awful products.

Great to hear you're using JIRA, Bitbucket and Confluence together. How is the integration between the tools? It's definitely a use case we're hearing more often where teams need more than just storing and working on code.

They're getting better. BitBucket and JIRA work together quite well. With "Smart Commits" in the JIRA hosted version that allow us to move a ticket's status, comment on it, log time, or just show activity towards a ticket via Git commit messages. I use the heck out of it and the team is following quickly behind.

JIRA follows the feature branching workflow pretty well, so if you branch from dev/master with the ticket number as the start of the branch name you can click through to that branch straight from JIRA, which is generally pretty nice.

Confluence isn't nearly as tightly integrated with either. There are some reports, widgets, and stuff you can grab out of JIRA and make some dashboard type reports. Nothing special- we use Confluence to document architecture, deployment procedures, etc. We're definitely not Confluence power users.

If you want to use GitLab on the cheap consider using GitLab.com, it is totally free and has unlimited repo's and collaborators.

It's so funny that this is the way it's become, as Atlassian grew up being the cheaper, simpler alternative to extremely expensive, super opaque, ultra closed source systems like Clear Case. I remember a time when Atlassian actually raised the prices of Jira's top level of support and service because enterprise CTOs were confused by such a low price point.

Ten years ago I made exactly this migration for a SaaS shop's helpdesk & dev team. At the time JIRA was easily the best value & most customisable solution for integrated ticket tracking. I learned Java & Groovy to write extensions for it. It wasn't just CTO/CIO friendly, JIRA really was the great choice at the time in both UX and ease of implementation. Especially if you'd been bogged down hacking RT or GNATS or permanently scarred by anything from Rational.

What I realised is that eventually they're all ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a workflow engine and metadata service. Your choice is mainly of the interface and domain-specific layering violations.

Troll-friendly soundbite: Atlassian is the new Rational.

"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"

Let us know anything specific you'd have us improve - love to know what changed over the last 10 years to make you change your mind.

> I learned Java & Groovy to write extensions for it

For the last 3 months, Groovy has been officially known as "Apache Groovy".

At $WORK we use Jira/Confluence, and instead of Bitbucket Server we chose Gitlab because I have experience with it, and it comes with integrated CI.

BTW, this is not some small startup...

Cool to hear that! For reference, since many organizations use Jira GitLab CE and EE have extensive Jira integration http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/project_services/jira.html

Yep, if that didn't exist we would have had to go with Bitbucket Server.