UPDATED: As of Jul 10th 2009
Open Source seems to be exploding all over the place at the moment and with online services increasingly jumping on the free offerings its been fantastic for developers wanting to host, manage, flaunt and communicate their projects online. Here’s a rundown of 6 free SVN hosting and project management offerings I like the look of.
Unfuddle
Nice name and nice site. Very web 2.0 and slick with project tracking such as issue tickets, source control, time tracking, milestones, etc. The free package only comes with 200Mb and restrictive user allowances (1 per account) and only one project. This makes them the stingiest of the group. This is reflected in their price-resources on paid plans with $99 only getting you 10Gb and 50 projects. Compare this to $59.99 at Codespaces for the same space but unlimited projects.
Pros: best interface, great features, Git support.
Cons: high price, low resources, tiny free account.
CodeSpaces
They have a hefty 500Mb for 2 free users per account and they have a good range of prices starting from $9 per month for 4-man teams upto $59 for unlimited.
Pros: nice interface, good pricing, active and involved developers.
Cons: Not as many features as the ‘big-beast’ Assembla.
Assembla
Part of a large and feature-packed service full of project management features as well as basic 200Mb of SVN hosting. It even has a jobs board but the project hosting comes with wiki pages, blogs, etc. The free package has all of this but lacks phone supports and is only for open source projects. They have VERY competitive prices starting from $3.
Pros: packed with features, reliable, supports Mercurial.
Cons: pricey in the higher plans.
OpenSVN
One of the first to release free SVN hosting and starting to show its age with very barebones features. They had a major failure in backup and restore last year which causes some worry about their reliability. So when I say “free SVN hosting” I really mean just that!
Pros: unlimited space, unlimited projects.
Cons: very unreliable, no features!
XP-Dev
This is a very no-frills setup but they have one killer feature: Private SVN repo hosting – FOR FREE!! Made for agile and extreme programmers this doesn’t have a lot of the features inherent in other services but thats just fine. Its also got an unlimited repo limit.
Pros: unlimited repos, free private hosting
Cons: Only one paid option, very few features.
Bounty Source
Still going strong after I first mentioned it back in June Bounty Source offer your basic SVN along with a wiki and CMS for managing your projects online presence as well as a task tracker. Bounty Source have a unique feature though that enables a developer to be paid for the work they carry out on user feature requests. Something I really like the look of – all I need now is an open source project people are going to pay me to finish!
Pros: bounty system helps devs get paid to work.
Cons: no paid option, looking old, falling behind in features.
SourceForge
Like an old grandfather clock this has been around years and although very reliable its showing its age. They tried to spruce it up with some Web2.0 gradients and curves but you can’t scrub out the moldy smell from that interface and features-set.
Pros: reliable, well established.
Cons: very intrusive ads, pain to use.
Google Project Hosting
They seem to have taken a lot of the old school methods of project hosting from SourceForge. Unfortunately as mentioned earlier they’re looking old and although Google looks much cleaner its features still lack the richness that the smaller providers have who’ve gone all out on innovation while Google remains formulaic. Google also don’t provide paid private hosting. Its all open source here.
Pros: reliable, clean interface, good features, supports mercurial
Cons: no private paid options, open source only
Comparison Table – Free Accounts
| Metric | Unfuddle | Code Spaces | OpenSVN | Bounty Source | XP-Dev | SourceForge | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Project/Repo | 1/Unlimited[1] | Unlimited/Unlimited | 1 | Unlimited | 5 | Unlimited[4] | Unlimited |
| Space | 200Mb | 50Mb | Unlimited | N/A[3] | 300Mb | Unlimited[4] | Unlimited |
| Wiki | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Tracking | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Browser | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
- [1] Unfuddle allow one active project but unlimited numbers of repos within it.
- [3] They state nowhere on their site about limits to project size.
- [4] Google claim in their terms that there’s no upper limit but they reserve the right to impose one.
Thank you very much for this great listing. It helps a lot.
Hi, thank you for the great listing, which is most useful as I’m now scouting for a free SVN host.
By the way, I understand some SVN hosts while free, require our codes to be made open to the public. Does this apply to any of the hosts that you have listed above?
Thanks once again!
Unfortunately Assembla closed its free service. But they also lowered the prices.
The Assembla information in the article isn’t uptodate anymore.
I just posted an article that includes up to date information on Assembla SVN hosting alternatives. I also don’t want my code open, so sourceforge and google are out of the question.
http://www.zerrtech.com/content/assembla-now-planning-charge-svn-hosting-find-some-alternatives
Jeremy Zerr
Thanks for the heads up Jeremy. Its been updated now.
I have been using Assembla for a while.
Now I will try out unfuddle.com
Excellent resources. Thanks for that. Nice blog, by the way.
thanks for updating this page so fast
Nice blog, by the way. Thanks for that. Excellent resources.
excellent website, thanks, this made it really easy to choose my svn site
Excellent post. really helpful. thanks a lot for you time.
hmm, found a SVN host that I will try, thnx
Thanks for the svn tips. Also, I recently used unfuddle.com. It works fine.
There is also Origo (http://origo.ethz.ch) which provides free project collaboration and hosting (including svn) for open source and closed source projects.
xp-dev.com’s space limit has been increased to 1500MB!
thks I was working on assembla it was great, but bad luck it is no longer free …
now I’m movin to unfuddle, hope they have a good services…
XP-Dev information is out of date!
Space: 1500 mb per account, multiple accounts allowed.
Wiki: yes.
Tracker: yes.
Browser: they said that’s included in the next release.
Repo’s: unlimited.
Projects: unlimited.
So I think XP-Dev is the best!
BTW, you should also have a look at their features page:
http://xp-dev.com/wiki/1/Features
Id like to mention modcenter.
Developers – Unlimited, Bug Tracking, Wiki, Document and Image Library. Repos – Unlimited
At ProjectLocker we just launched Free Subversion, Trac, and Git hosting. 2 Users, 300 MB, unlimited projects. We also have paid plans for more space and users starting at $2.50 a month (annualized). Check us out at http://www.projectlocker.com . We’d love a chance to earn your business.
is there a list of paid SVN hosts somewhere? Best would be some with a customer list, in order to convince our customers that its okay for us to host their precious source code on it.
Assembla still offers free account which forces you to be “open source” but otherwise looks great.
nice job! thanks
Thanx for useful post.
CodeSpaces seems to have changed their restrictions: http://www.codespaces.com/shop . It’s much more generous now: unlimited projects and 500 MB space.
Just found ProjectLocker http://www.projectlocker.com which has an excellent free offer. You could replace Assembla with ProjectLocker now. The big advantage with ProjectLocker: they host Trac as their issue management system which in turn easily allows you to use Mylyn from Eclipse. Neat!
fyi, unfuddle’s free plan is now 200MB.
Take a look at redmine at http://www.redmine.org. I think this is my favorite so far.
SourceForge is the best among all these.
The Code Spaces FREE Plan gives unlimited repositories and 500MB of disk space.
CodeSpaces seems to have ditched its free plan. Now has only “Mini” plan for $2.00/mo
What about project locker? 500MBs free up to 5 users and I think unlimited projects.
For $25 a year you can up the storage to 2.5GBs, $50 a year will get you 5GBs (same users). The highest plan is 30 users, 30GBs for $300 a year, $30/month or save a lot and get the 2yr plan for $499.
I have account in Unfuddle,
and i have SVN server local at my company and i am searching for Open source web based svn management system to manage my local SVN server i wish to find one like Unfuddle use
Thank you
Codespaces seems to be neglecting their technical support. I asked them technical questions on two occasions and never heard back.
For a free private (closed-source) or public SVN there also exists Origo: http://www.origo.ethz.ch
No disk quota (although they ask you to warn if you need more than 10GB), community platform, and I love the widgets and IDE plugins they offer.
Quote from their FAQ (http://www.origo.ethz.ch/wiki/doc):
Origo is the hosting platform for your projects:
* Origo provides all the basic mechanisms that your project needs:
o An SVN repository (with web interface)
o A template project wiki page (you’re looking at one right now)
o An issue tracker with tag support
o A place to put your releases (ftp upload, API based upload)
* Origo is not just a web site but an API: Your developments can take direct advantage of all the Origo mechanisms through a programming interface.
* Origo is available for both your open-source and closed-source projects.
* Origo is a scalable platform based on a peer-to-peer architecture.
Origo provides the functionality expected of any good software forge, but focuses on simplicity, offers an API, and is available without restriction to both open-source and closed-source projects.
非常感谢，你的帮助。
这些资料对我非常有用。
而且你还经常更新这些信息，真的太棒了。
我非常感动。
Thank you very much for your help。
This is very important to me。
Even you also updated the content，this is awesome.
I am very impressed.
Beanstalkapp.com offers svn. There’s a free option with 1 user, 1 repo. I can’t really get it to work with my system and their help pages are no good. But hey, maybe someone wants to try it.
Hi, recently discovered your blog but I have to say that it seems nice. I fully agree with your post. Have a good day, keep up the nice work and I’ll definitely keep reading.I just got in to the BF BC2 PC
А продолжение по теме будет?
В целом согласен, хотя по мелочам можно и поспорить