GitHub vs GitLab vs Bitbucket: the per-seat number that hides the real cost

On the sticker price alone, Bitbucket wins by a mile: Standard is $3.65/user/month, Premium $7.25. GitHub Team lands around $4/user. GitLab's Premium tier looks expensive next to both at roughly $29/user/month. If you stopped reading there, GitLab would look like the wrong answer.

It isn't, and here's why the raw comparison is misleading: GitLab's Premium price bundles security scanning, CI/CD, project management, and monitoring tooling that GitHub and Bitbucket charge for **separately**. Add GitHub Advanced Security (roughly $21/user/month) and a Copilot Enterprise seat to GitHub's base price to match what GitLab includes out of the box, and the total gap narrows sharply — sometimes it reverses entirely, with GitHub ending up more expensive once you've bought the equivalent feature set.

| | Base price/user | What's bundled in that price |
|---|---|---|
| Bitbucket Standard | $3.65/mo | source control + basic pipelines |
| GitHub Team | ~$4/mo | source control + Actions minutes |
| GitLab Premium | ~$29/mo | + security scanning, compliance, PM tooling |

GitLab's Ultimate tier has moved further away from a published list price toward custom quotes, which is usually a sign that the buyer is now a large enough organization that "per seat" stops being how the deal gets negotiated at all.

Practically: Bitbucket is the right call if your team is already inside Atlassian (Jira, Confluence) and you want the cheapest way to add source control to that stack. GitHub is the right call for almost everyone else by default — the largest ecosystem, the most third-party integrations, and Copilot bolted directly onto the workflow. GitLab earns its price specifically when you'd otherwise be buying four separate tools (SCM, CI, security scanning, project tracking) and paying four separate invoices to do it.