Bitbucket, Atlassian’s GitHub-like Git and Mercurial 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.
Atlassian says about 450,000 teams with a total of 3 million users now use the Bitbucket service. The company’s add-on marketplace for its other platforms has paid out about $65 million since its inception three years ago.
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.
“Nowadays, shipping great software involves constant context switching using tools that don’t integrate tightly,” Atlassian’s Ike DeLorenzo says. “This is a challenge that development teams face every day. Most integration architectures available right now in the software industry only partially solve the problem. They only provide simple integration points that prevent teams from creating deeper integrations and a more unified workflow.”
For developers, integrating their apps into Bitbucket looks to be pretty straightforward, though the procedure is quite different from how developers can hook into some of the company’s other services like JIRA and Confluence.
Bitbucket competes with GitHub, GitLab, Microsoft’s source code management services and others. Because Git has become such a standard in the industry, there is also a vast ecosystem around it. By integrating some of these tools right into the UI, though, Bitbucket has a chance to differentiate itself from much of the competition by making life a little bit easier for developers.