Atlassian Bitbucket vs. Perforce P4

As a team we need to push code into the repo on daily basis, Bitbucket has proven that is a reliable and secure server to save and get the code available in no time. The administration part is really easy and there's an extra tool for every developer profile either if you want to use the console or a GUI like Sourcetree.

Incentivized

For large-scale codebases with fixed and regular releases that do not follow a continuous delivery paradigm, Perforce is certainly well suited. In projects that are small and distinctly separated from other discrete (though potentially dependent) units, the benefits of the Perforce tool may not be as clear of a victor over other systems.

Incentivized

• Free private repositories for small teams - this is great to save costs relative to other options
• They have some robust (although sometimes confusing) team and project management tools
• They have built out many pipeline and integrations, but we did not use these

Incentivized

• Merge algorithm is smart and utilizing the visual interface to do merges makes them easier to digest.
• Easy to set up on multiple platforms and architectures and is well supported on all of them.
• Visual interface has many tools and customization options that help to optimize and personalize workflow.

Incentivized

• While it integrates flawlessly with other Atlassian products, it's lacking in 3rd party integrates, especially compared to competitors like GitHub and GitLab
• Using Jira for issues gives a lot of power, but it's also a lot of overhead and complexity that may or may not be necessary for your organization. It also puts issues in another tool, adding a little friction when it comes to addressing issues in your code
• Searching for and discovering other projects and GitHub isn't quite as intuitive or easy to use as competitors

Incentivized

• I was having a hard time learning it. Even if you are an experienced developer, there is some learning curve.
• Can be slow when working with large data sets at once.
• When working on multiple workspaces on the same machine, Perforce can make it difficult not to mess up the code.

All products have room for improvement. The system improves over time with better and better integrations and I look forward to even more features without paying extra! The system has increased transparency across my organization and with this transparency comes increased throughput on projects. I don't think I can go back to any other system and we are definitely married to this product.

Incentivized

We have a need to consolidate into a single package, and have such a large variety of technical proficiency among our users that Perforce seems less suitable. Many would like to remain using it, however, even those who use Perforce are the minority, and are often limited to our development teams.

Incentivized

The architecture of Bitbucket makes it more easily scalable than other source code management repositories. Also, administration and maintaining the instance is very easy. It integrates with JIRA and other CI/CD applications which makes it more useful to reduce the efforts. It supports multiple plugins and those bring a lot of extra functionality. It increases the overall efficiency and usefulness of Bitbucket.

Incentivized

With Perforce Helix, you can use it via the command line, via P4V, or any of the other APIs included with the product. It is extremely easy for new users to get up and running. Users of Perforce Helix only have to pull in the files of interest to them. Also, Perforce is very easy to script and integrate into your CI/CD pipeline. Streams allows you to have pinpoint control of your workflow, and P4Search is the absolute best--I wish Perforce (the company) would talk more about this. It is absolutely fabulous!

Incentivized

In our large environment, Perforce is rarely "down". We have regular maintenance windows and from time to time Perforce can feel a little slow, but its always available. Tech support has always worked with our engineers and IT department to make sure that any real performance or stability issues are addressed quickly.

Incentivized

The customer support provided by Atlassian (Bitbucket's parent company that also makes Jira, Confluence, etc.) is very helpful. They seem to be very concerned about any issues reported with their products and even just questions about functionality. They are constantly improving the products with new features in nearly every release. Plus they have a plethora of online documentation to reference.

Incentivized

I had two representatives from Perforce contact me after downloading it but never responded when I had questions. I also had a difficult time finding good training material for getting started. There is a lot of available support material when running into issues, though, because of how many large companies use it.

Incentivized

This rating is related to setting up an environment from an existing Perforce repository. Initial setup of Perforce as the repository for the company was done by a separate team long prior to my inception.

Incentivized

For the features we were looking at, Bitbucket, GitHub and GitLab were all at par and were in a similar price range. We found that GitHub was the most full featured should we need to scale very quickly. GitLab was at par with GitHub for our future needs, but GitHub was a more familiar tool compared to GitLab. Bitbucket won out because of its close integration with Jira and being in the Atlassian family. It was also cheaper than GitHub. As we started with Jira, Bitbucket addition became a natural next step for us. We really liked Bitbucket and stayed with it but we do know we have great options in the form of GitHub and GitLab should we need to scale fast.

Incentivized

New users of Perforce Helix can be up and running in less than thirty minutes. It is easy to use, but also very powerful. Bitbucket is slow, prone to outages, and (for large teams) requires a team of dedicated administrators. I've had request for information from Bitbucket that requires hours to pull together that would take me less than 30 seconds in Perforce Helix. Large file storage in Bitbucket is clunky and requires you to jump through too many hoops. It's not even something you have to think about with Perforce Helix, as you are only limited by your OS. Perforce Helix is very easy to use even for non-developers. I wouldn't dare ask a non-developer to store their documentation in Bitbucket.

Incentivized

• The overall return on investment is very high compared to other source code management tools.
• Having a subscription model only is making BitBucket's cost of ownership very high over the years. There should be an alternative option for the purchase of a license permanently (like proprietary software).
• Paying separately for premium support is not a good idea. Premium support should be part of the package itself.
• No local or on-call support available in Singapore and many other countries is also painful. There should be some local presence, at least in their leading market countries like Singapore.

Incentivized

• Locking assets make us have no merge problems which are harder to manage on other versions control without locking
• Almost no need to give support to artists or non-tech folks because the operations are very straightforward
• There's no way to do interim checkins without going to the process of creating a stream

Incentivized