Bitbucket is a web-based code-hosting and collaboration service, launched in 2008 and now owned by Atlassian. In its origins it was tied to one particular version-control system: Atlassian itself records that “When we launched, centralized version control was the norm and we only supported Mercurial repos,” and that “Mercurial will always have a special place in Bitbucket’s history.”
Atlassian acquired Bitbucket and later broadened its scope, adding support for git alongside Mercurial so that teams using either distributed system could host their code there. Today Atlassian describes the product simply as “a Git based code hosting and collaboration tool, built for teams,” offered in both cloud-hosted and self-managed forms with integrated continuous-integration and delivery pipelines.
A defining feature of Bitbucket is its tight connection to the rest of Atlassian’s software suite, especially the Jira issue tracker. Atlassian markets Bitbucket’s “best-in-class Jira and Trello integrations,” which let developers see branches, build status, and commits against Jira issues and transition those issues automatically based on pull-request status. That integration is a large part of why teams already using Jira adopt Bitbucket rather than a standalone host.
Over time the market shifted decisively toward git. Atlassian noted that the share of new Bitbucket users choosing Mercurial fell below one percent, and the company eventually retired Mercurial support to focus on git. Bitbucket thus traces an arc from a Mercurial-first forge to a git-centric, Jira-integrated GitHub competitor.