Enterprise Git Hosting: What GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket Actually Cost

Had to evaluate all three when we hit 200 devs and the free plan finally died. Sticker prices are horseshit - here's what you'll actually pay.

GitHub Enterprise: $21/month becomes $70 real fucking quick

GitHub lists $21/user/month like that means something. That's before your security team finds out about Advanced Security and decides they can't live without it.

GitHub's pricing page looks reasonable until reality hits:

CI minutes evaporate faster than free coffee. 50k minutes sounds like a lot until every goddamn feature branch triggers Docker builds, integration tests, and security scans. We burned through our allocation by day 12 of the month. GitHub's billing docs show overage rate is $0.008/minute - doesn't sound like much until your bill jumps from $5k to $9k with zero warning.

Advanced Security becomes mandatory. Your security team will read one blog post about dependency scanning and suddenly $49/user/month isn't optional anymore. Boom - you're at $70/user before you've deployed a single feature. There are cost optimization strategies but good luck convincing security to disable half their precious scans.

The Bitbucket migration was 6 weeks of hell. Sales promised "a few days." Reality was rewriting every single CI config because GitHub Actions YAML is completely different from Bitbucket Pipelines. Lost count of how many times I heard "this used to work in Bitbucket" during standups.

But here's the thing - devs don't bitch about GitHub. The search actually finds code, PRs load in under 30 seconds, and Actions mostly works without randomly failing. When your team isn't fighting the tooling, they ship faster.

Bitbucket: Cheap because it's 2005 tech with a 2024 price tag

Bitbucket pricing looks amazing at $6.60/user/month until you actually try to use it:

• 25 users: $2,300/year (Data Center)
• 500 users: ~$16k/year (if you hate your devs)
• 2k+ users: "call for pricing" (corporate speak for "bend over")

Yeah, it's cheap. There's a reason why.

Search doesn't fucking work. I'm not exaggerating - try finding a commit message from last quarter. The search will return 3 random commits from 2019 and call it a day. Bitbucket's search issues are well documented, with users reporting "Search is currently unavailable" for weeks at a time. Our devs gave up and just git clone everything locally to use grep.

PR reviews from the stone age. Diff viewer chokes on any file over 1000 lines. Inline comments randomly vanish between page loads. Mobile app crashes if you look at it sideways. I've seen devs email diffs instead of using Bitbucket's review system.

Pipelines fail for sport. Same commit, same branch, same fucking everything - fails randomly with "Build encountered an error" and zero logs. Restart it three times and suddenly it works. Our DevOps guy started drinking heavily during the Bitbucket months.

If your CFO is breathing down your neck about costs and your devs are saints who won't quit, Bitbucket might work. Spoiler: your devs aren't saints.

GitLab: $99/month per dev or your CFO will have a stroke

GitLab has three tiers but only Premium ($29) and Ultimate ($99) matter unless you enjoy missing basic features.

GitLab's pricing at least doesn't hide costs - everything's upfront. The problem? Ultimate costs more than most people's rent. They even have an ROI calculator to justify the sticker shock.

500 devs on GitLab Ultimate = $600k/year. That's literally a senior engineer's entire comp package just for Git hosting. I had to present this to our board with a straight face. GitLab claims 483% ROI over 3 years but that assumes you actually use every feature they bundle.

Security scanner flags literally everything. Last week it marked console.log('hello world') as "critical injection vulnerability." Took our security team 3 days to understand this was JavaScript logging, not SQL injection. The scanner generates ~500 false positives per week that someone has to triage.

CI quota math makes no sense. Premium gets 10k minutes but shared runners count different than your own runners, Docker builds eat minutes faster than npm builds, and parallel jobs multiply everything by some coefficient they don't explain. We went over quota running the same pipelines that worked fine the month before.

UI changes every goddamn Tuesday. GitLab ships so aggressively that the screenshot in yesterday's documentation shows a completely different interface. Spent an hour last week looking for the security settings that got moved to a different menu. Again.

If you need everything (Git, CI/CD, security, project management, container registry, kitchen sink), GitLab Ultimate delivers. But $99/user/month is house payment money for some Git repositories. For comparison, that's 5x more than GitHub Enterprise and makes even AWS CodeCommit look reasonable.

Self-hosting sounds badass in meetings when you're talking about "data sovereignty" and "infrastructure ownership." Less badass when you're googling "nginx 502 gateway timeout" at 2am on a Sunday while 50 devs can't push code because LDAP decided to take a nap.

Cloud: Pay More, Sleep Better

Cloud hosting costs more per month but saves your sanity. Unless you have a team of infrastructure nerds who get excited about maintaining Git servers, just pay the cloud tax.

GitHub Enterprise Cloud: Expensive But It Actually Works

GitHub's cloud hosting at $21/user/month is pricey but your developers won't file support tickets every week. It just works:

• No 3AM Pages: GitHub handles all the server bullshit
• 99.95% Uptime: Better than your internal IT team can manage
• 50,000 CI/CD Minutes: Until your team discovers automated testing
• Global CDN: Faster than that server in your basement

Reality check: GitHub Enterprise Cloud vendor lock-in is real. Once your team gets used to GitHub Actions and the UI, switching platforms becomes a 6-month migration project nobody wants to own.

Bitbucket Cloud: Cheap Because the UX Hurts Your Soul

Bitbucket Cloud starts at $6.60/user/month, which is great until your developers start complaining:

• Atlassian Ecosystem: Works with Jira, if you enjoy suffering
• 1,000 CI/CD Minutes: Runs out in the first week of heavy development
• 2005-Era Interface: Makes developers nostalgic for better times
• Search That Doesn't Work: Finding code becomes a treasure hunt

War story: Used Bitbucket Cloud for 18 months because our CFO saw the price. Dev satisfaction survey gems included "I would rather use vim than this interface," "can we please just pay for GitHub," and "I've started emailing myself diffs because the PR system doesn't work." The performance issues in self-hosted environments don't help either.

GitLab SaaS: Everything Included, Everything Expensive

GitLab Premium at $29/user/month or Ultimate at $99/user/month includes everything, which is both a blessing and a curse:

• All the Features: Project management, CI/CD, security scanning, kitchen sink
• No Add-On Hell: Unlike GitHub, you're not nickled-and-dimed to death
• 50,000 CI/CD Minutes: On Ultimate, which costs more than rent
• Built-in Security: That half-works and flags every minor dependency issue

Real experience: GitLab Ultimate's security scanning generates 500+ false positives that take 2 weeks to triage. But hey, at least compliance loves all the reports.

Self-Hosting: When "We Control Our Data" Becomes "We Debug at 3AM"

Self-hosting Git platforms sounds great in meetings. It sounds less great when you're the one getting paged because LDAP is down and 300 developers can't commit code.

The Real Infrastructure Costs (Aka Why CFOs Cry)

Here's what self-hosting actually costs (spoiler: way more than the brochures):

Hardware/Cloud: $100k-300k/year (always double your estimate)
Infrastructure Engineer: $200k/year (the good ones demand $250k after 6 months of Git server hell)
Backup Systems: $50k/year (pray you never need to test them at 3am)
Monitoring Tools: $30k/year (to alert you that everything's fucked)
Weekend Therapy: Not covered by insurance but definitely needed

GitHub Enterprise Server: The "Just Works" Self-Hosting Option

GitHub Enterprise Server is basically the cloud version but running on your servers for the same $21/user. Sounds good until you realize:

• No clustering: If your server dies, everyone stops working
• Missing features: Half the cool cloud stuff doesn't work on-prem
• You own the problems: SSL certificates, OS updates, security patches, all you
• Performance issues: Big repos make it sad, and there's not much you can do

Bitbucket Data Center: Cheapest Self-Hosting (For Good Reason)

Bitbucket Data Center starts at $28k/year for 1,000 users, which sounds great until you use it:

• Actually clusters: At least if one server dies, the others keep working
• Terrible UI: Still looks like 2005 but now it's your problem to maintain
• LDAP nightmares: Every authentication issue becomes your 3am problem
• Mirror everything: Backup strategy involves lots of copying stuff around

GitLab Self-Managed: All the Features, All the Maintenance

GitLab self-managed gives you the same features as the cloud version, plus the joy of running it yourself. Some teams save $10k/year but most underestimate the operational costs:

• Kubernetes complexity: Hope you like YAML debugging
• Everything included: Which means everything can break at 3am
• Omnibus installer: Makes setup easy, troubleshooting hard
• Same pricing: Pay cloud prices plus infrastructure costs

The Brutal Truth About Cloud vs Self-Hosting

Use cloud when:

• You want to ship features instead of debugging Git servers
• Your team is under 500 people and doesn't include infrastructure masochists
• Sleep matters more to you than "data sovereignty"
• You've learned from other people's self-hosting disasters

Self-host when:

• You love getting paged at 2am for Git server outages
• Your security team thinks "the cloud" is just someone else's computer
• You have infinite budget for infrastructure engineers
• Compliance requires on-premises and you've exhausted all other options
• You enjoy explaining to developers why their commits failed because LDAP is down

The Bottom Line: Cloud vs Self-Hosting

Pick cloud when:

• You value your weekends more than "data sovereignty"
• Your team is under 500 developers
• You'd rather ship features than debug Git servers
• You've seen what happens to other companies that tried self-hosting

Pick self-hosting when:

• Compliance actually requires it (not just security team paranoia)
• You have infrastructure engineers who enjoy pain
• Budget for hosting is unlimited
• Your lawyers make the technical decisions

Most companies pick cloud and sleep better at night. The ones that don't usually regret it around month 6 when they're hiring their third DevOps engineer just to keep the Git servers running.