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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 |
Google |
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.
I’ve tried more than once to jump onto the Google App Engine bandwagon to no avail. Unfortunately it’s preview nature is acting to frustrate any attempt I make build something I’m happy with. Just some thoughts so far:
I recently completed a 
