That's the one thing keeping me off bitbucket is the fact that nobody else is there. Admittedly their pricing is better (especially wrt. private repos, something i'm still not ready to shell out cash for), but the interface seems to be a Github ripoff.

Github is quickly becoming the social network for coding - there's no reason to use an also-ran copycat who lacks the "social" part. (And this isn't to disparage Atlassian, they're one of my favorite companies!)

They're both good. My open source repos are on Github. My private (thus client-related) repos are on BitBucket. I've been pretty happy with this configuration.

Perhaps it helps that I know a few other companies and developers locally using BitBucket for private repos.

Incidentally, reliability and price are both valid reasons to "use an also-ran copycat", in my personal opinion, if that also-ran copycat is pretty damn good.

I guess the bitbucket's UI is a ripoff... the same way that OpenOffice's UI is ripoff of MS Word. This argument has been pulled so many times before and it's not relevant in this topic which is github's often downtimes.

No, but it's hardly a point in their favor, either. Anyways, OO looks like Word because the professional-compatible text editor UX is generall pretty static Toolbars, buttons, etc.

BB on the other hand is just missing some curved buttons on their UI - you have to admit the resemblance is uncanny.

I get the same gut feeling from Bitbucket as I would from a chinese knockoff of a well known product. Sure it might even be better in some ways but it still feels like a cheap imitation of the original.

Call me crazy :)