UPDATED: As of Nov 4th 2008 (Now with 10 services reviewed!)
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 15Mb and restrictive user allowances so not quite as generous as XP-Dev mentioned below.
CodeSpaces - Their free service is quite conservative with just 50Mb and one project allowance per account. They make up for this though by having some great prices and the service is pretty good too. Though their features don't come close to Assembla - so if you're willing to fork out the money then go with them.
Assembla - is no longer a free service but their prices have been drastically reduced to just $2 per user.
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 so even if you don’t stump up the $49 p/m for the paid you’ll get one hell of a service.
OpenSVN - One of the first to release free SVN hosting of open source projects and starting to show its age with a very clunky interface and 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!
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 a generous repo limit.
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!
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.
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 althoguh 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.
Comparison Table
| Metric | Unfuddle | Code Spaces | OpenSVN | Bounty Source | XP-Dev | SourceForge | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Project/Repo | 1/Unlimited[1] | 1/1 | 1 | Unlimited | 5 | Unlimited[4] | Unlimited |
| Space | 200Mb | 50Mb | Unlimited | N/A[3] | 300Mb | Unlimited[4] | Unlimited |
| Wiki | Yes[2] | 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.
- [2] It should be noted that these are note pages.
- [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.
37 Responses
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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.
fyi, unfuddle’s free plan is now 200MB.
SourceForge is the best among all these.
The Code Spaces FREE Plan gives unlimited repositories and 500MB of disk space.
Continuing the Discussion