Top 10 Source Code Versioning and Management tools

Last updated: May 19, 2023

Source Code Versioning and Management tools allow to store software source code and control the changes to files made by multiple developers.
1
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over seven million people use GitHub to build amazing things together. Free public repositories, collaborator management, issue tracking, wikis, downloads, code review, graphs and much more…
2
GitLab offers git repository management, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds and wiki’s. Enterprises install GitLab on-premise and connect it with LDAP and Active Directory servers for secure authentication and authorization. A single GitLab server can handle more than 25,000 users but it is also possible to create a high availability setup with a multiple active servers.
3
Bitbucket is a free code DVCS hosting site for Git and Mercurial. Manage your development with a hosted wiki, issue tracker and source code. Host, manage, and share Git and Mercurial repositories in the cloud. Free, unlimited private repositories for up to 5 developers give teams the flexibility to grow and code without restrictions.
4
Assembla workspaces allow to accelerate software teams. Ticketing and issue management, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Wiki, and other collaboration tools to accelerate development. Unite your team with a single activity stream view.
5
SourceForge is an Open Source community resource dedicated to helping open source projects be as successful as possible. We thrive on community collaboration to help us create a premiere resource for open source software development and distribution.
6
Google Developers is now the place to find all Google developer documentation, resources, events, and products. Project Hosting on Google Code provides a free collaborative development environment for open source projects.
7
RhodeCode Enterprise is the secure collaboration environment that works the way you do — with your workflows, your permissions, on your platforms. Safely tucked behind your firewall. Increased project security and permissions control along with real-time repository news feeds give managers a birds eye view on project progress and complete control over access to highly sensitive data, driving projects to come in on-time and under budget with no compromise on either productivity or security.
8
FishEye provides a read-only window into your Subversion, Perforce, CVS, Git, and Mercurial repositories, all in one place. Keep a pulse on everything about your code: Visualize and report on activity, integrate source with JIRA issues, and search for commits, files, revisions, or people.
9
Launchpad is a software collaboration platform that provides bug tracking, code hosting using Bazaar and Git, code reviews, translations, mailing lists, answer tracking and FAQs, specification tracking
10
Beanstalk allows designers and developers to store source code, track changes, and collaborate with their team through Subversion and Git version control. Imagine a single process to commit code, review with the team, and deploy the final result to your customers.
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11
Subversion exists to be universally recognized and adopted as an open-source, centralized version control system characterized by its reliability as a safe haven for valuable data; the simplicity of its model and usage; and its ability to support the needs of a wide variety of users and projects, from individuals to large-scale enterprise operations.
12
StarTeam brings world-class agile change management to organizations with multiple repositories. Streamline workflows by connecting tools, processes and teams via a single repository. StarTeam maintains and tracks changes to source code, defects and features, to gain control over distributed and collaborative development. Maintain visibility and traceability across your software assets.

Latest news about Source Code Versioning and Management tools


2020. GitHub is now free for all teams



GitHub made all of its core features free for all users. That means free unlimited private repositories with unlimited collaborators for all, including teams that use the service for commercial projects, as well as up to 2,000 minutes per month of free access to GitHub Actions, the company’s automation and CI/CD platform. Teams that want more advanced features like code owners or enterprise features like SAML support will still have to upgrade to a paid plan, but those now start at $4 per month and user for the Teams plans instead of the previous $9, with the Enterprise plan starting at $21 per month and user.


2018. GitHub business users now get access to public repos



GitHub, the code hosting service Microsoft recently acquired, is launching a couple of new features for its business users that will make it easier for them to access public repositories on the service. Traditionally, users on the hosted Business Cloud and self-hosted Enterprise were not able to directly access the millions of public open-source repositories on the service. Now, with the service’s release, that’s changing, and business users will be able to reach beyond their firewalls to engage and collaborate with the rest of the GitHub community directly. With this, GitHub now also offers its business and enterprise users a new unified search feature that lets them tap into their internal repos but also look at open-source ones.




2018. Microsoft acquired GitHub



Microsoft has acquired popular code sharing and collaboration service GitHub for $7.5B. From the smallest startups to giants like Microsoft, companies use the cloud-based service to work on code collaboratively. GitHub has 27 million software developers working on 80 million repositories of code. So it seems like a natural acquisition for the new Microsoft, which under CEO Satya Nadella has increased its focus on serving software developers via cloud services — whether they’re coding for Microsoft Windows or not. In the case of GitHub, it’s used for everything from websites to iPhone apps. Microsoft’s GitHub acquisition also mean we’ll start to see even closer integration between Microsoft’s developer tools and the service.


2016. GitHub gets project management tool



GitHub unveiled the "biggest update" of its Git-based code hosting service. With this update, GitHub is moving beyond code by adding some basic Kanban board-like project management features. GitHub always featured support for integrations with a number of project management tools, but now you will also be able to use this new built-in tool to move cards with pull requests, issues and notes between columns like “in-progress,” “done,” and “never going to happen” (or whatever else you want those columns to be called). Like Trello and similar tools, you’ll be able to drag and drop cards between columns as needed.


2016. Atlassian launches Bitbucket Pipelines



Atlassian unveiled Bitbucket Pipelines that offers a continuous delivery service that’s built right into the Atlassian-hosted Bitbucket Cloud service. Thanks to this, developers can easily automate their workflow of building and deploying their code every time they push an update to their Bitbucket repositories. During the beta, Bitbucket Pipeline will be available for free to all developers who want to give it a try. Other updates include the launch of Connect for JIRA Service Desk, which now allows third-party developer to build embeddable add-ons for that services, and the open-sourcing of RADAR, Atlassian’s internal tool for generating API documentation, which unsurprisingly follows the Open API Initiative’s specs.


2015. Atlassian merges Bitbucket and Stash developer services



Atlassian has long offered a number of Git-based developer services under the Bitbucket and Stash brands for developers who want either need a cloud-based or on-premises code management service. Now, however, the company is combining these brands under the Bitbucket name and launching a number of new features for its Git-based services. Atlassian is also announcing three major new features to Bitbucket. The first is Git Mirroring, which will make it easier and faster for distributed teams to use Git. The second is support for large files — something Git has long struggled with — and the third is support for projects, which will make it much easier to organize complex Git repositories. It’s worth noting, though, that Bitbucket now competes with the likes of GitHub Enterprise and other enterprise Git services. Even Microsoft, after all, now offers Git support in its Team Foundation Server products.


2015. Collaboration platform for developers GitLab raises $4M



GitLab, the open source Git-based collaboration platform for developers, today announced that it has raised $4 million in Series A funding. The company, which offers both a free community edition, a free SaaS version and a paid enterprise edition of its service, says it will use the additional funding to accelerate growth and expand its global operations. Git, of course, has become the default way to manage code for many development teams. While GitHub is likely the best-known Git-hosting service, there are a number of competitors in this space — all of which tend to put a slightly different twist (and user interface) on top of what is essentially a hosted version of Git. Atlassian, for example, offers both free and paid Git hosting services. GitLab’s focus on its open source solution sets it apart from some of these competitors.


2015. Version control service GitHub raises $250M



GitHub, the software development collaboration and version control service based on the popular open source Git tool, has raised a $250 million funding round. The company plans to use this new round to accelerate growth and expand its sales and engineering team (as most companies do when they raise). There can be no doubt that Git has become something of a de facto version control system for many startups and GitHub currently leads the charge among companies that essentially offer Git as a service. Atlassian, Microsoft, GitLab and others offer similar services, both cloud-hosted and on premise, but GitHub has clearly attracted most of the mindshare in recent years. GitHub says it currently has about 10 million users who are in collaboration on over 25 million projects (that’s up from 10 million in January 2014). Given that the company offers free accounts, it’s not clear how many of these users are actually paying for the service, though (pricing starts at $5/month).


2015. Code management service Bitbucket opens to third-party extensions



Bitbucket, Atlassian’s GitHub-like code management service, is getting a major update this week that now allows third-party tools to integrate their applications right into the service. Atlassian claims that this new Connect for Bitbucket feature will help developers get all the information they need to ship their code in one place without having to constantly switch between tools that aren’t integrated with each other. The company argues that there is no other product in the market that allows this kind of integration right into the product’s user interface. Some of the launch partners for this feature include code analytics services like StiltSoft and bitHound, cloud IDEs like Codeanywhere and Codio, and Sourcegraph‘s code search tool. In total, there are currently about a dozen plug-ins available.


2015. Google discontinues Google Code



Another Google service is being shuttered because Google says it has been superseded by alternatives. This time it’s Google Code for the chop — with Google justifying full closure on the grounds that a “growing share” of projects on the service are “spam or abuse” and the associated “administrative load” is “almost exclusively” related to abuse management. In a post on its Open Source Blog, Google notes that times have changed since it set up Google Code way back in 2006, with the aim of providing a reliable and stable project hosting site. Ergo it claims developers have since moved to “better” services, such as GitHub — including Google itself moving many of its own open source projects to where more of the developer action is.


2014. GitHub Enterprise now works on Amazon Web Services



The new version of code repository software GitHub Enterprise 2.0 allows to take the service’s virtual machines and stand up a highly scalable version of GitHub‘s services on Amazon’s cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services. The update also includes a number of other features, no matter whether it’s hosted on AWS or not. Companies want to be able to use their existing single sign-on solution with GitHub, for example, and they can now use and LDAP or SAML compatible solution to do so. Also new are security audit logs, so admins can keep a better tab on users and allow them to audit account, team and repository access over time.


2014. Enterprise code management service RhodeCode get $3.5M funding



Berlin-based company RhodeCode, that focuses on behind-the-firewall application lifecycle management, has scored $3.5 million in funding. It started off as a fairly straightforward source code management platform to rival GitHub and so on, but it discovered that its customers were largely big enterprises (like U.S. Navy and Department of Energy) that have no intention of storing their valuable code in the public cloud. So RhodeCode ditched its software-as-a-service version and decided to focus on its behind-the-firewall RhodeCode Enterprise product instead.


2014. ZenHub helps engineering teams manage projects inside GitHub



GitHub is now popular enough for other companies to start building services around it. One of the latest projects that aims to make working with GitHub faster and easier is ZenHub. With ZenHub, teams get a project management service that is deeply integrated with GitHub and provides them with Trello-like drag-and-drop task boards, easy uploads for any type of file (GitHub’s interface only allows image file uploads by default) and +1 buttons for providing quick feedback about commits, pull requests, suggestions and comments. The focus is mostly on developers, but the easy-to-use interface also allows business users to manage their workflows in GitHub, which could eliminate a company’s need for any other third-party management tool.


2014. Atlassian brings Stash to large enterprises



Stash, Atlassian's software for Git-based code management, was basically focused on small teams. But today it is launching Stash Data Center, its Git solution for large enterprises. Unlike the regular Stash service, Stash Data Center can run on a cluster instead of a single server. Thanks to this, Stash can easily support 10,000 developers. For them, Stash Data Center will look and work exactly like the current version. They may notice fewer slowdowns, faster compile times and less downtime, but their daily workflows won’t change. Atlassian assumes that Stash Data Center users will install the service on their own clusters behind their firewalls. In the long run, it may also run on public clouds like AWS.