I tried the top 5 Bitbucket alternatives for development teams in 2025

So, your team is taking a hard look at its toolchain. It happens. Bitbucket is a solid platform, especially if you’re already living and breathing the Atlassian ecosystem, but it isn’t a one-size-for-all solution. Maybe you’re on the hunt for more powerful CI/CD, a self-hosting option that gives you more freedom, or just a pricing plan that doesn’t make your finance department wince.

Whatever the reason, you’ve landed in the right spot. We’ve gone through the top Bitbucket alternatives to help you figure out what makes sense for your team in 2025. Picking a new code repository is a big deal. It’s not just a technical swap; it’s about finding a tool that genuinely clicks with your team’s entire workflow. We’ll focus on what really counts: Jira integration, CI/CD power, and how smoothly everything runs day-to-day.

What are Bitbucket alternatives?

First off, a quick refresher on Bitbucket. It’s a Git-based source code manager from Atlassian, best known for how nicely it plays with Jira. For a lot of teams, it’s the default choice for keeping project planning and coding all in one place.

Bitbucket alternatives are simply other platforms that do the same job: version control (usually with Git), team collaboration features, and built-in CI/CD pipelines. The options are pretty varied. You’ve got huge, do-it-all DevOps platforms like GitLab on one end and nimble, open-source tools like Gitea on the other. Teams usually start looking for an an alternative when they need more control over where their code is hosted, feel constrained by Bitbucket’s CI/CD, want a better price, or find their work stretches beyond what the Atlassian suite offers.

How we picked the best Bitbucket alternatives

To pull this list together, we zeroed in on the things that development teams actually care about when they’re thinking of making a switch. We wanted this to be a genuinely helpful guide, not just a list of features.

• Jira integration: How well does it connect with Jira Software and Jira Service Management? For teams that rely on Jira as their source of truth for every task and bug, this is a dealbreaker.

• CI/CD capabilities: Does it have a strong, built-in CI/CD solution, or are you going to have to duct-tape third-party tools to it? We looked for platforms that make automation feel straightforward.

• Hosting & pricing: We made sure to include a mix of cloud and self-hosted options. Transparent pricing and decent free tiers were high on our list, because not everyone has an enterprise budget.

• Collaboration features: A repository is more than just a place to dump code. We looked for quality-of-life features like good code review workflows, built-in wikis, and issue tracking.

• Developer experience: Is the UI intuitive? Does the platform help developers get work done, or does it just add another layer of frustration?

A quick comparison of the top Bitbucket alternatives

Here’s a bird’s-eye view of how our top picks measure up.

Tool	Best For	VCS Support	Self-Hosting	Jira Integration	Free Tier
GitLab	All-in-one DevOps platform	Git	Yes (Community Edition)	Excellent (Native)	Generous plan with private repos & CI/CD minutes
GitHub	Open-source & community collaboration	Git	Yes (Enterprise Server)	Strong (via Marketplace app)	Generous plan with free private repos & Actions
Gitea	Lightweight self-hosting & control	Git	Yes (Open Source)	Yes (via third-party plugins)	N/A (Free to self-host)
Azure DevOps	Teams in the Microsoft ecosystem	Git, TFVC	Strong (via Marketplace app)	Free for up to 5 users
Assembla	Teams needing multi-VCS support	Git, Perforce, SVN	No (Cloud-based)	Strong (Native)	14-day free trial

The top 5 Bitbucket alternatives in 2025

Alright, let’s get into the details of each platform.

1. GitLab

GitLab claims to be a single application for the entire software development lifecycle, and honestly, it delivers. It does a lot more than just manage your code; it gives you solid tools for planning, CI/CD, security scanning, and monitoring, all bundled together.

The GitLab logo, representing a powerful option among Bitbucket alternatives.::

It earned its spot here because its built-in CI/CD is considered top-notch, and its native Jira integration is fantastic. This creates a really smooth workflow where you can reference and close Jira issues right from your commits and merge requests. It keeps everything in sync without you having to think about it.

The big win with GitLab is having everything under one roof, which can really cut down on juggling different tools.

The downside? With so many features packed in, it can feel a bit much to set up and manage. The UI can also seem a little busy if all you need are the basics.

• Pricing: GitLab has a free tier with 5 GB of storage and 400 CI/CD minutes per month. The Premium plan starts at $29 per user, per month.

2. GitHub

You can’t have a conversation about version control without bringing up GitHub. It’s the most popular code hosting platform out there, thanks in large part to its massive open-source community. Since being acquired by Microsoft, it’s added some serious muscle with features like GitHub Actions for CI/CD and Codespaces for cloud-based development.

A screenshot of GitHub Copilot in VS Code, a key feature for teams considering Bitbucket alternatives.::

Its Jira integration isn’t native (it requires a marketplace app), but it’s very capable and used by thousands of teams without issue. GitHub Actions is a flexible and powerful CI/CD system that easily competes with Bitbucket Pipelines. You get access to a huge library of community-built actions to automate pretty much anything you can think of.

What people love about GitHub is its massive community and ecosystem of integrations. The user experience is clean, fast, and clearly built with developers in mind. The main drawback is that the Jira integration isn’t built-in like Bitbucket’s, which means one more app to think about. Also, its self-hosted option, GitHub Enterprise, is geared toward larger companies and can get pricey.

• Pricing: The free plan is fantastic, offering unlimited private repositories and 2,000 Actions minutes per month. The Team plan starts at a very reasonable $4 per user, per month.

3. Gitea

Gitea is a community-managed, open-source project focused on one thing: providing a simple, fast, and painless self-hosted Git service. It’s incredibly lightweight, which means you can run it on just about any machine you have, even a Raspberry Pi.

If your team wants full control over its infrastructure without the beastly complexity or cost of GitLab or GitHub Enterprise, Gitea is your best bet. It nails the basics of version control, issue tracking, and code review without cluttering things up with features you’ll probably never touch.

The best parts are that it’s extremely lightweight, dead simple to install and maintain, and completely free and open-source. On the flip side, CI/CD isn’t built-in, so you’ll need to integrate it with a tool like Jenkins or Drone. Also, the Jira integration relies on community plugins, which might not have the official polish or support your team needs.

• Pricing: Free. The only cost is the server you decide to run it on.

4. Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps is Microsoft’s answer to the development lifecycle. It bundles Azure Repos for Git hosting, Azure Pipelines for CI/CD, Azure Boards for planning, and more into a single, connected platform.

For teams that are already deep in the Microsoft and Azure world, this is a pretty obvious choice. The integration with Azure’s cloud services is as smooth as you’d expect, making it easy to build, test, and deploy applications. The CI/CD is mature and full-featured, and its Jira integration through the Atlassian Marketplace is solid.

The seamless connection to the Azure cloud is a major advantage, and the free tier for small teams is quite generous. However, if you’re not using the full Azure stack, it might feel a bit too complicated for its own good. The UI can also feel a little more corporate and less intuitive than something like GitHub.

• Pricing: Free for the first 5 users. The Basic plan is $6 per user, per month after that.

5. Assembla

Assembla stands out by supporting more than just Git. It offers enterprise-grade hosting for Perforce (Helix Core) and Subversion (SVN), making it a lifeline for teams working with legacy projects or in industries like game development that haven’t fully moved to Git.

For those teams, Assembla is one of the few modern, cloud-based options out there. It also has strong project management tools that integrate well with Jira, making sure everyone can work together effectively, no matter which version control system they’re using.

The key benefit here is the multi-VCS support on a single platform, along with a strong focus on security and compliance for enterprise needs. The main drawbacks are the lack of a self-hosted option and a price point that’s generally higher than the other tools on this list.

• Pricing: Starts at $12 per user, per month for Git repositories. Perforce and SVN hosting are priced separately on higher tiers.

Tips for choosing the right Bitbucket alternatives for your team

Changing your source code management tool is a big move. Here are a couple of other things to keep in mind.

• Look beyond the repository. This decision affects your entire workflow. It changes how developers collaborate, how bugs are triaged, and how the support team interacts with engineering. Think about the whole picture, not just the code hosting features.

• Smooth out the dev-support handoff. One of the biggest bottlenecks in any tech company is the communication gap between customer support (using a helpdesk like Jira Service Management) and the engineering team. An AI tool can help bridge this gap by automatically handling the initial triage of bug reports, collecting logs from customers, and creating perfectly detailed tickets for developers. A tool like eesel AI connects to your helpdesk and takes care of these tedious jobs, regardless of which Git platform you choose.

• Bring your internal knowledge together. Developers spend a ton of time just looking for information that’s scattered across Confluence, Slack, and various internal documents. A built-in wiki is nice, but it often becomes just another place to lose information. An AI internal chat that connects to all of your company’s knowledge can give your team instant, accurate answers right where they work. For example, eesel AI can plug into Slack or Microsoft Teams and learn from your Confluence and Google Docs to act as a helpful bot for your engineering team.

An eesel AI chatbot in Slack providing instant answers, a useful tool when considering Bitbucket alternatives and improving workflows.::

This video compares popular platforms like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, and AWS CodeCommit.

Choosing Bitbucket alternatives: It’s all about the workflow

At the end of the day, the best Bitbucket alternative is the one that fits your team’s workflow, budget, and technical needs. GitLab gives you the whole package, GitHub offers an amazing community, and Gitea provides simplicity and control.

As you’re updating your dev tools, think about how you can improve the workflows around them, too. Improving things like developer support and internal knowledge management can lead to some big productivity wins for your entire company.

Ready to streamline your support and engineering workflows? See how eesel AI connects your helpdesk, knowledge bases, and development tools to automate tedious tasks and free up your engineers.