Our small consulting company uses the Mercurial source control system, and we needed to find a website that would host our repositories on the cheap.

The providers you hear the most about, such as Bitbucket and Google Code, are geared towards personal and not corporate use.   For example, Bitbucket *does* have private repositories, but makes you permission each person individually to each repository — which sucks when you’ve got a bunch of repositories.   Ideally you want everyone on your team to automatically see new repositories.

Here were some of our criteria:

• supports multiple logins under one master account
• closer to 10 bucks a month than 100
• online code browser and code diff
• creates private repos by default (unlike Bitbucket which creates public ones)
• user groups, so that we can permission all the employees of our outsourcing partner to specific repos easily, and revoke it just as easily
• wiki would be nice
• nice to have:  organize multiple Mercurial repositories into a single project

CodebaseHQ

• Nice UI, simple and helpful
• Love that a single project can contain multiple repositories
• Excellent visual diff tool
• Good user setup, very easy to add a SSH key
• Doesn’t have usergroups

RepositoryHosting

• Good user controls.  It’s quite easy to create group of users and permission them to one project, or even a category or projects.
• We liked that you can archive projects, which gets important as time goes on.
• We liked that you can have different project groups, which auto-apply different settings to the projects
• We didn’t like that a project can have only one repo
• It uses Trac for each project, which is ancient but it’ll do
• The whole thing’s a little pokey and sluggish
• UI’s a little archaic feeling, as it Trac itself
• The UI’s not well integrated. For example, to get to the list of commits you have to go into yet another area with its own authentication, a website produced by the hg application itself

RepositoryHosting VS CodeBaseHQ

Pros for CodeBaseHQ

• CodeBaseHQ very nicely namespaces the repositories within a project, so we can create a project called Customer and have all of their repositories within it.
• The UI is miles better than RepositoryHosting:  instead of each repo having separately authenticated sites for trac and the hg browser, it’s all one smooth thing.
  • For example, I appreciate how my dashboard shows a combined list of all the commits and status messages across all projects, and each status message is fully hyperlinked to the stuff it talks about.

Pros for RepositoryHosting

• It’s cheaper.
  • CodeBase makes you pay more for more projects.  RepositoryHosting it’s purely by the GB.
• It has user groups and CodeBase doesn’t.
  • This is really needed for the Infocepts scenario.
• CodeBaseHQ takes a few clicks to get to the list of repositories
• A little easier to see what hg commands are available

Rejected Providers

Versionshelf