UPDATE (11/2/2011): GitHub Enterprise is for companies to run behind their firewall, which is not possible with Bitbucket. BitBucket has no locally installable version.

GitHub just released Enterprise to provide companies with a secure, fast self-hosted system for software development and collaboration.

GitHub Enterprise features code browsing, pull requests, APIs, code review, issue tracking and wikis. Enterprise also supports LDAP and CAS so companies can use existing authentication systems and provides full system backups of all data.

While Enterprise costs $5K/year per 20 users, competitors like Bitbucket, and Fogbugz and Kiln, offer similar services, yet not locally installable versions, for much less -- even 20x less. Bitbucket, which just added Git support last month, costs $240/year for 20 developers.

"There's a reason that more than a million developers use GitHub," GitHub's Zach Holman tells LAUNCH via email. "We think these reasons work in larger enterprise settings, too. They face the same problems: quickly sharing code in an organization, communicating with your team, organizing issues and wiki pages in a project. GitHub Enterprise has the additional benefit of addressing all of these problems from one tidy package- you don't need to buy and install different pieces of software to get what you get with Enterprise."

GitHub launched a precursor, the GitHub Firewall Install, to Enterprise a few years ago but has officially retired the product. Zach writes on the blog, "As it's grown into a bigger part of our business, we've learned to design a great, installable product. GitHub Enterprise is the result of the last twelve months of hard work."

"What changes with GitHub Enterprise, though, is that some companies will be able to use GitHub when they couldn't previously, Zach says. "There are a lot of companies in the financial, medical, and other sensitive industries who are restricted by law or by policy from hosting their code on a third-party site.

GitHub Enterprise is delivered via the OVF (open virtualization format) standard, which enables them to provide a consistent platform and more stable environment.

"We also spent a lot of time reworking our server processes," Zach says. "Enterprise is much, much faster than FI ever was."

GitHub also changed how they merge .com and Enterprise, moving away from hard, manual merges that tended to slow down the roll-out of new features.

Back in July, GitHub CTO Tom Preston-Werner told LAUNCH that sales of the enterprise version were “increasing pretty rapidly,” and that the company wanted enterprise revenue to exceed individual sales in a few years, but wouldn't release enterprise client names.

GitHub is currently offering a free 45-day trial to test the product. Check it out and let us know in the comments if it's worth the price.

SCREEN SHOT

CONTACTS & LINKS

Zach Holman, Ego Surfer
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/holman
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/zachholman

Tom Preston-Werner, CTO
Email: tom at github.com
Twitter: @mojombo
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tom-preston-werner/4/122/382
GitHub profile: https://github.com/mojombo

Kyle Neath, Director of Design
Twitter: @kneath
Website: http://warpspire.com/

GitHub
@github
Blog: https://github.com/blog

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