Forges in research software development: evaluating Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitLab for Amsterdam UMC

Forges are toolkits for collaboratively developing and distributing software, extending the functionality of distributed version control systems such as git. We seek to integrate forges into research software development at Amsterdam University Medical Center (UMC) in alignment with our data-driven strategy (Daemen et al., 2021). To determine which forge(s) would be most suitable, we evaluated the three forges that are most popular in 2024: Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitLab (Le Berre et al., 2023). For the forge evaluation, we listed six licensing features, and eight technical and social features. We ranked Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitLab on each of these features as above average, average, below average, or unknown. For a general impression of the suitability of each forge, we also calculated a simple unweighted score based on our rankings. Based on our forge evaluation, we selected GitHub, and next evaluated three academic subscription scenarios for GitHub.