Assembla – Free SVN and GIT Hosting, Collaboration and Bug Tracking Tools

Posted on December 29, 2010

When discussing code hosting services with my colleagues or friends I usually refer to Assembla as the giant of all the Code Hosting Services. You want to know why?
Because I have been using Assembla for my private projects for a while and never had a single complaint. Because you get SVN hosting, GIT hosting, Mercurial Hosting, ticketing system, issue/bug tracking system, wikis, message boards, file managers, tasks managers and project management in a single platform. Because you may get all of this for free for public projects or one of these for free if you prefer to have your project privately hosted. Because 180,000 Developers and Project Managers can’t be wrong!

I have to admit one thing – Assembla commercial versions are actually a bit expensive. There are several paid plans, all of them offering a 30 day free trial. But I started this post to write a little bit about the free plans and that is what I am going to do. Assembla’s free plans offer you more than any other code hosting service ever did. And Assembla is so much more than just a code hosting platform!

First of all it is important to mention that a single user account may have several spaces. This means that you can have several public or private spaces and they can all use the same tools or you may choose to use different tools in different spaces.

What kind of spaces can you create for free? What are the free plans?

Assembla has several free plans. In every plan you can count on 2 GB of free web space, unlimited users, email alerts of events and an activity stream. You can request and download backups of your spaces, you can control who does what in each project and you can change the appearance of the project’s web interface.

Now that you know what are the free plans’ common features, I bet you want to know what are the specific features of every plan.

Free Plans on Assembla

The free plans on Assembla for public projects are:

• Subversion Hosting with Integrated Tickets (Ideal for agile distributed teams) – is a simple but powerful system for keeping track of tasks, features, and bugs. This free plan comes with 7 pre-installed tools: Messages, Files, Source/SVN, Wiki, StandUp, Milestones and Tickets.
• Issue and Bug Tracking for Agile Teams (A great ticketing, bug tracking and issue management tool for any project) – using this plan you will transform your team, replace meetings, memos and phone calls with a hosted system that organizes all your bugs, issues, trouble tickets and tasks. This free plan comes with 4 pre-installed tools: StandUp, Tickets, Milestones and Wiki.
• Team Collaboration (Helps organize your team even if you are not building software) – you can track project activity, share files and documents, collaborate using a project wiki, and video chat with your team. This free plan comes with 5 pre-installed tools: Files, Messages, Wiki, Chat and StandUp.
• Real-time chat with video (Meet with your team now, and at any time) – track project activity, send instant messages, share files, have face-to-face video conversations with your team to talk about project tasks and deadlines, all in real-time. This free plan comes with 6 pre-installed tools: StandUp, Messages, Dashboard, Wiki, Chat and Files.
• Git Hosting with Integrated Tickets (Our preferred space for GIT users that also need great ticketing) – this full-featured package includes a Git repository, with the Assembla integrated ticket system, and other collaboration tools. This free plan comes with 7 pre-installed tools: Messages, Wiki, Tickets, Milestones, Source/Git, Files and StandUp.
• Trac and Subversion Hosting (If you’re familiar with Trac, this space configuration is perfect for you) – this version of trac is enhanced with email alerts that go beyond the built-in ticket notifications. They added HTML formats, hourly and daily alerts, and SVN commit notifications. Trac includes a ticketing system, a wiki, milestones (for agile iterations or releases) and a subversion code and changeset browser.
• Free Subversion Repository – Commercial Quality (A commercial quality, FREE Subversion repository without any other tools) – a free Subversion repository ideal for consultants and small agile-development teams that want a safe, reliable version control solution.
• Free Git Repository – Commercial Quality (A commercial quality, FREE GIT repository without any other tools) – a free GIT repository ideal for consultants and small agile-development teams that want a safe, reliable version control solution.
• Free Standup tool (daily StandUp report is the fastest and simplest way to manage a distributed team) – stand up meetings were originally derived from the Agile approach to developing software, but can be used by a team working on any kind of project.

NOTE: These are featured configurations for public spaces. You can create your own configuration using some or all of these tools.

There are also 3 free plans for personal private projects.

• Free Subversion Hosting (Unlimited Repositories, Unlimited Users, 2 Gigabytes Storage) – this free SVN hosting provides you with a commercial-quality subversion repository for you to host your code securely, and reliably in a good-looking package. All the free svn repositories allow both public and private permissions so you can share your code with the world, or keep it private only sharing with fellow developers.
• Free Git Hosting (Unlimited Repositories, Unlimited Users, 2 Gigabytes Storage) – this free GIT hosting provides you with a commercial-quality subversion repository for you to host your code securely, and reliably in a good-looking package. All the free svn repositories allow both public and private permissions so you can share your code with the world, or keep it private only sharing with fellow developers.
• Free StandUp/Scrum (The easiest way to manage a distributed team) – Invite Your Team Members. When your team members start their work, ask them to file a StandUp report with 3 simple fields: What You’ve Done, Will Do, and Roadblocks to finishing their work. At-a-glance you can see what everyone is doing and eliminate roadblocks before they slow you down.

Other Code Hosting Services

Other free public and private code hosting services:

• Bitbucket (Mercurial)
• ProjectLocker (Subversion and Git)
• Unfuddle (Subversion and Git)
• XP-Dev.com (Subversion, Git and Mercurial)

Other free public code hosting services:

• CodePlex (Subversion and Mercurial)
• Google Code (Subversion and Mercurial)
• Launchpad (Bazaar)
• SourceForge (Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and CVS)

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