So you want to host an open source project using one of the many free services available but can’t decide which one to use? If only someone would put together a quick summary of each of the major offerings…

Hosting providers covered in this post:

Bitbucket

CodePlex

GitHub

Gitorious

Google Code

Launchpad

SourceForge

Bitbucket is a hosting site for the distributed version control systems (DVCS) Git and Mercurial. The service offering includes an issue tracker and wiki, as well as integration with a number of popular services such as Basecamp, Flowdock, and Twitter.

Features:

Supports both Git and Mercurial

Allows private repositories for free, up to 5 users

Unlimited repositories

Has JIRA integration for issue tracking

Has its own REST API

Downsides:

Only allows up to 5 users for free (a user defined as someone with read or write access)

CodePlex is Microsoft’s free open source project hosting site. You can create projects to share with the world, collaborate with others on their projects, and download open source software.

Features:

Supports both Git & Mercurial

Integrated Wiki that allows to add rich documentation and nice looking pages

Bug Tracker and Discussion Forums included

Downsides:

Often times feels more like a code publishing platform than a collaboration site

Primarily geared toward .NET projects

Build software better, together. Powerful collaboration, code review, and code management for open source and private projects.

Features:

Supports Git

Powerful and easy to use graphical tools

Easy team management

Integrated wiki, issue tracker and code review

Downsides:

Only supports Git

Quite a few ‘dead’ projects on the site

The Git hosting software that you can install yourself. Gitorious.org provides free hosting for open source projects that use Git.

Features:

Supports Git

Free project hosting

Integrated wiki

Can download the software and install it on your own server

Downsides:

Only supports Git

Project Hosting on Google Code provides a free collaborative development environment for open source projects.

Features:

Supports Subversion, Mercurial Git

Integrated wiki

Downsides:

Not very pretty

Launchpad is a software collaboration platform.

Features:

Supports Bazaar

Integrated bug tracking and code reviews

Ubuntu package building and hosting

Mailing lists

Downsides:

Only supports Bazaar

Geared toward Ubuntu (which can be a downside depending on your project)

Find, Create, and Publish Open Source software for free.

Features:

Supports Git, Mercurial, Subversion

Integrated issue tracking, wiki, discussion forums

Stat tracking

Downsides:

Ads

A lot of ‘dead’ projects

Now obviously I’ve missed some things and glossed over others but my goal here was to provide a quick ‘at a glance’ summary of each. Check the individual websites for more. Thanks to the people over at Stack Exchange for doing a lot of the legwork.