Bitbucket may not be in the spotlight (probably suffering from being Jira's sibling) but in my opinion its web user experience is more pleasant than GitHub's. I'm talking about branch visualization and operations, pull request creation, UI layout flexibility. Bitbucket feels like a sober and useful tool, while GitHub is more like a claustrophobic social network centered on code to me.

No offence, but as someone who has only ever used github and gitlab, can you clarify why it's uncool?

Atlassian products is a collection of poorly integrated and maintained applications each with serious issues which Atlassian refuses to fix. Atlassian is basically where things go to die.

If Atlassian products is a collection of poorly integrated what to say about plenty of enterprise solutions?

I am yet to find something that works as good as Atlassian products.

I disagree with the parent that they're poorly integrated. They're probably better-integrated than most other options out there. IMO the real problem with Atlassian products is that individually they are not good. Confluence is a bad wiki, Jira is a bad issue/project tracker, Bitbucket is a bad source code management tool.

Individually they all have a lot of flaws to the point that if they only existed on their own, no one would use them. But features like native support for referencing Jira issues in Confluence and having them auto-update makes companies want to use it.

Part of it, I think, is the development tool version of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". It's considered the safe choice. Enterprise-y companies get wooed by all the "Atlassian consultants" floating around out there. The ecosystem is just designed to attract enterprise users.

> I disagree with the parent that they're poorly integrated. They're probably better-integrated than most other options out there. IMO the real problem with Atlassian products is that individually they are not good. Confluence is a bad wiki, Jira is a bad issue/project tracker, Bitbucket is a bad source code management tool.

Fair enough, I agree - they are not that poorly integrated as they are just really poor tools.

I have been a very happy user every time I used Atlassian products on their own, so bad are many of the in-house enterprise alternatives, or products like DOORS and Notes.

Each to their own, I guess. We use Jira and Confluence at my org. I personally don't make use of the integrations between them all that much, but I find them painful to use on their own.

Atlassian is better than the enterprise solutions which preceded it, but that is a very, very low bar.

Their tools are remarkably slow, with each page both being remarkably JavaScript-heavy and constantly reloading (the two should be mutually exclusive, right?).

They really aren't bad, and have some advantages, but they are not a joy to use.

Their abrupt cease of support for mercurial damaged it beyond repair for me and many others. They didn't even offer to migrate stuff with the click of a button, people started writing scripts to migrate, and while you are migrating, why not to GitHub which in the meantime also gained free private repositories?

> Their abrupt cease of support for mercurial damaged it beyond repair for me and many others.

I'm not the biggest Atlassian fan, but they posted in August last year, gave 10 months notice and cited that less than 1% of new repos being created are using mercurial as their primary reason for doing so. If you cared about a project, almost a year is plenty of time to move it. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to sunset a feature that is not widely used by your users, not widely used outside of your userbase, and that requires ongoing maintenance that the other 99% of repositories could benefit from instead.

It was more like a community and they destroyed it. Less than 1% of new repos were mercurial (what a surprise with zero mentions of mercurial anywhere except small text and zero marketing and they didn't even have it in their self-hosted product), sure, but existing repos were the problem. Some abandoned ones are lost forever. At least archive them, offer a tar download, anything... People had to parse the issues, people had to parse discussions, all the settings, access rights... I think after a year they could put everything in archive mode, but no, they deleted it with no easy export.

That's not OK and I'm clearly very, very angry as a former user.

> I think after a year they could put everything in archive mode, but no, they deleted it with no easy export.

I mean, it's still there. If it's that much of an issue, and the tooling has been made by the community, you're free to archive it now. At what point is it ok for them to say "hey, we don't want to pay to store the data/keep the codepaths to display/interact with this data" anymore?

How many of those people were paying customers before this? I don't know the answer offhand, but if I had to guess, I'd suspect a small number of them.

> That's not OK and I'm clearly very, very angry as a former user.

I hope as a paying customer, you cancelled your subscription to them and told them explicitly why then.

> At what point is it ok for them to say "hey, we don't want to pay to store the data/keep the codepaths to display/interact with this data" anymore?

At the point when they make it super easy for the people to archive the data themselves. Code part is easy, PRs, issues and downloads are hard. See: Google takeout

> I hope as a paying customer, you cancelled your subscription to them and told them explicitly why then.

Not just even for me, I made my company switch to it, and we were also hoping support for mercurial in the future, but were okay with it not supporting mercurial in local deployments, we had our hg repos on bitbucket.org. When the news broke, I moved to GitHub and perkeep (for archiving all the JSON data that I painstakingly had to scrape), and my (now former) company found a smaller vendor that offered what BitBucket was supposed to offer but never delivered, only for 100x the price (although one-time, custom development for them).

>abrupt cease of support for mercurial

Yes exactly that, i think for bit-bucket it would have been less damaging NOT to support git but exclusively mercurial..and maybe bitkeeper ;)

Probably spillover from hating Jira, the popular-but-bad bug tracker system.

Yeah, hatred mostly because Jira is the grand enabler of micromanagers and corporate accountability and a bit slow.

It can be whatever people want to use it for. The customisation and the key features of the tool are not bad. Then again, most tools are neutral until a person wields them.

[Edit typo]

Jira is heaven compared with Excel sheets, or half backed task management done by Summer interns than many of us have suffered with.

I have endured all, from web forms storing their data via Perl CGI scripts to Excel sheets which require a PhD in VBA macros to change anything.

True, those solutions are always horrible. Still don't like Jira that much. Every corp somehow managed to slow that system down to a crawl that using it became a pain.

Still a great fan of Trac. Old but gold, simple and fast. Suffers a bit from a historical focus on SVN, but can be adapted to git easily.

There's a consensus in hating Jira, but nobody could ever agree on a suitable alternative.

I get that Jira can be poorly configured, but it's not Lotus Notes bad.

Jira is not bad per se, people use it like a generic CMS, and it also can be one, and that creates problems.

Firstly Bitbucket allowed free personal private repos, so many people who did not actually want to use it did for closed source projects. Bitbucket has generally had the least pleasing UI, and the association with Atlassian sort of corporate feel made it seem uncool to a degree. It just didn't really feel great to use for me. I've used all 3 extensively.

I've transitioned with companies from Github to Gitlab, from Bitbucket to GitHub etc. but never to Bitbucket. In fairness I was using Gitlab during their great outage, so I can say that cool is not always reliable. And coolness fades and dies relatively fast.

But I can't remember Bitbucket ever being cool.