My big problem with Assembla has been that they equated one project (“space”) with one source repository, and charged extra for extra spaces. Each extra space gives extra issue tracking, documentation storage and so on. This might make sense in a traditional centralised subversion model, but it’s completely alien to git, where a project is commonly represented by a network of repositories.

As of 14 April, Assembla now offers unlimited repositories with each space, allowing a single project to share issue tracking, documentation, activity notifications etc. across multiple repositories. If you don’t need the rest of the features, they also now offer basic private source repositories for free, presumably with the idea of up-selling the other services.

Assembla seem to have slightly better tools than Unfuddle, but its hard to tell as they still don’t offer a real, private, non-expiring, “try before you buy” like Unfuddle does. With Assembla you get a month’s usage before you have to start paying, and their cheapest plan is $24 per month, considerably more than Unfuddle’s “micro” plan of $9 per month.

Both services are free for open-source projects, but then so are plenty of others (sourceforge, github, and so on.)

For the moment, I am still happy with Unfuddle, but I’m keeping an eye on Assembla.

Top tips include “don’t interview when hiring”, “don’t estimate work”, “don’t do conference calls”, etc… Contentious, but very well explained and justified. This podcast is so packed with thoughtful stuff that I’m sure I’ll listen to it again.

Podcast on Managing Distributed Agile Projects

Eventually I have found two likely candidates: unfuddle and assembla. Both offer most of what I want, but with a few differences.

Unfuddle is probably the simpler of the two. It offers subversion and git hosting, a kind of wiki called “Notebook”, a kind of low-rent bulletin board called “Messages” for discussions, deadline management using simple text milestones, and bugs/tickets using Trac. It also provides RSS and iCal feeds of workspace events and upcoming milestones. With increased monthly payment you can also get time tracking and file attachment storage for messages.

Assembla offers subversion, mercurial and git hosting (and can integrate with remote subversion and github repositories), a wiki with extensions to directly reference tickets, bugs, software versions etc., similar “messages” to unfuddle but with file attachment storage included, bugs/tickets using trac or a proprietary alternative, similar milestones to unfuddle (but I can’t find any iCal feeds which is a shame), time recording, scrum-style progress reporting, and a few other options such as a “chat” facility and a specialist repository for storing and annotating images. It can provide updates of events using twitter or by HTTP call-outs, which seems pretty flexible.

Neither one seems to have a very sophisticated calendar, so no arranging meetings etc. Neither one has any significant collaborative planning in the vein of Mingle or Silver Catalyst. Neither supports recording of anything other than time (money spent on each task would be very useful, for example.) And neither supports continuous integration as such (although it could probably be hacked together using Assembla’s HTTP call-outs.)

Pricing seems roughly similar, although calculated differently.

Unfuddle offers five price bands (free for open source, $9, $24, $49, and $99 per month). Each band offers larger quantities of storage, numbers of participants and projects etc. The $9/month plan offers 512MB of storage for 10 people on 4 projects, so for an example small private team of three developers the cost would be $9/month

Assembla determines pricing per user per “space” (a space seems roughly to equate to a single project). Free for public spaces. For private ones, each user/space is $2/month, and $3 per gigabyte of storage per month. So for the same small private team of three developers the cost would also be $9/month but for more features and more storage. The down side is that adding any new team member, even one who only needs occasional access, costs extra.

I have registered for free accounts on both systems and have started to try out everything I can. I’ll report back soon on my findings.

In the meanwhile I’d love to hear from anyone with any other suggestions for project hosting services along the lines of these two.