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by VWWHFSfQ 1736 days ago
I'm my experience almost everything that Atlassian makes is total garbage. Bitbucket, Jira, Confluence, etc. are all horribly slow to the point of being unusable and most of it has very poor UI/UX. I pretty much don't recommend anything they make. It's not surprising at all that a fundamental feature of a wiki, search, doesn't work very well.
9 comments

IMO bitbucket is okay. Its UX for PRs is amazing, 1000x better than Githubs. Especially its side by side diff.

This concludes, and fully encompasses, everything good that I have to say about Atlassian products.

Atlassian bought Bitbucket after it was already mature. That's why!
Not quite. Bitbucket was acquired in 2011, only supported Mercurial and was missing a lot of features, including the pull request available today.
Perhaps they didn't fire the whole bitbucket team after buying them, so the people were still able to produce good software for a short time.
Bitbucket Server, which some people are referring to here, was build from the ground up, tailored to a self hosting environment.
I have a few plugins to improve the PR's in bitbucket too, showing you the relative size of the PR compared to others you normally work with.

Includes the language breakdown and such. Makes it much easier to know if you should be blocking out 5 mins to 5 hours to review something and if you even should be depending on the language.

Alas, Atlassian does not offer PVA for Bitbucket (it was meant to be there in July) so I cannot release it since it costs me money to host. I really wish they would invest more time into Bitbucket.

Try to use Intellij's Github plugin. It does wonders.
We use bitbucket cloud, and the PR UX is awful. Which version are you using? Are you using a browser extension or something? Compared to UpSource or GitHub, Bitbucket PRs are very rough.
Bitbucket Cloud and Bitbucket On-prem are two entirely separate products. It makes about as much sense as you can expect from Atlassian. The former was a Mercurial thing that they purchased then later removed Mercurial support. The latter used to be called Stash.

We moved from Bitbucket On-prem to Gitlab and I must admit I do miss parts of Bitbucket's UI. It was much easier to find reviews you needed to do and it was much clearer when reviewers had finished reviewing and if work needed to be done. Gitlab should just copy this stuff.

I was the head of product for the developer tools at Atlassian in 2012. We thought long and hard about taking Bitbucket cloud and packaging it in a VM (which is what GitHub did at the time) or leveraging the platforms we’ve already built for Confluence and Jira that would give us access control and a plug-in system from day 1. It was a tough call.

Ultimately we’ve decided to build on top of our server platforms and target companies with 1000+ employees from day one. That decision had a huge impact on how we approached performance and what features we prioritised. The hierarchy of projects and permissions associated with them as well as the way we designed Pull Requests are good examples of that.

It was the right decision at the time, even if the product happened to be different in cloud and server, which did lead to some confusion. But Stash customers were really happy with the product.

bitbucket PR is horrible compared to reviewboard
Atlassian products feel like raw database frontends. I feel like each screen in each Atlassian product is always exactly a database table, being presented to me as an auto-generated form. Might as well use SQL directly.
The truly impressive feat (of Jira in particular, but also all of Atlassian's products in general) is how incredibly slow they are. I assume each page somehow touches every single row of every single table in the database because I don't know what else it could be doing to make page loads take so long.
It’s artificially slow to get you to upgrade. Wish I was joking. Thankfully my company uses Clubhouse/Shortcut which is orders of magnitude better.
That really couldn't be further from the truth, especially in Jira. Jira keeps virtually every piece of interesting information in a custom field, including built-in fields like issue titles and points (known as system fields but effectively the same thing). Every view you see is the product of a zillion complicated joins across field definitions, field schemes, field values, field permissions and other bits and pieces.
Why use a single query languange when one for each view is possible?

- Atlassian probably

They are garbage for developers but managers love it. Guess who decides in the end?
That's what everyone has said about every piece of enterprise software ever.
It happens any time the buyer isn’t the user. Atlassian products are terrible because some manager buys them and tells everyone they have to use it, and if the engineers complain they’ll probably just blow it off as “they’re too demanding” or “they don’t want to do Agile right”.
It's the incentives that are in place. Most enterprises buy products based on feature sets. Therefore, enterprise software companies prioritize delivering features.
I remember what a friend said about software.

The desktop people want the latest and greatest software ASAP if not sooner.

The server people want nothing to change, ever.

I'm sure enterprise software has similar rules and incentives.

wait until you see medical enterprise software or defense industry enterprise software
I have seen self-hosted Jira installs that took 20+ sec to load a page.

Today I use one that they host and there is nothing wrong with it.

I tried their hosted version for a bit on their 30-day trial or whatever.

Virtually every page load took upwards of 5 seconds.

Also, having 5 jira issues opened in separate tabs simply kills the browser. It’s awful.
We used the hosted version. It would lag on the order of seconds while trying to type in the issue description box. We switched to another issue management software.
Well, they bought Trello and ruined it too :(
What’s wrong with Trello? It still seems to run fast? And has some new stuff added that seems to be useful? Dunno, still seems to be fine to me.
Hey even Trello got ruined, lol. Fucking Atlassian, feature overload.
+1, Bitbucket search often returns results from older versions of a repo. Wouldn't be an issue if syncing to the current master didn't take a few days...
So true. The way Atlassian hijacks browser keyboard hotkeys in Jira/Confluence/Bitbucket is purely infuriating.