4 Online Collaboration Tools for Developers

By Alex Carter on September 16, 2024

Online collaboration software has been on the rise since the World Wide Web pushed us into an era of cloud computing. Today, we review the 4 best online collaboration tools for developers. You can now harness the power of the cloud to do almost anything, such as; collaborate, create, and design before deploying applications. The use of collaboration tools can make teamwork more efficient through proper planning, organizing and managing of resources.

1. Beanstalk App

Beanstalk App is a popular collaboration tool for developers. It has a free version with 100 MB storage, and the paid packages start from $15/month. Beanstalk allows developers to achieve the following:

• Version control for mercurial, git or subversion code repositories;
• Working from web or mobile browsers;
• Instant HTML preview;
• Code Editing using a built in editor within Beanstalk;
• Assigning and seeing responsibility for each code line via a Blame tool;
• Advanced deployment technologies to many cloud providers;
• Issue tracking;
• Email Notification;
• Code review and comparison of changes in files;
• A News Feed for your project, all within the activity feed panel;
• A highly secure application.

2.  Jira by Atlassian

Atlassian is known for building products for developers. They are the makers of a very popular source code-hosting site called Bitbucket.org. They also make a lesser known, but powerful, project management software product for collaborative development, called Jira. Jira starts at $10/month. Jira boasts the following features:

• The ability to track everything, including issues, tasks and bugs;
• Management of application lifecycle, from start to finish;
• Facility for Agile Development (achieved through GreenHopper add-on);
• Linking of issues to source code;
• Pulling in of code from various repositories like Github, Bitbucket, etc.;
• Creation of custom searches using JQL (Jira Query Language) to make access quicker;
• Building of custom dashboards as you and your team see fit;
• Generation of reports of all kinds;
• Over 400 add-ons allowing you to extend Jira’s power;
• Creation of keyboard short cuts to access Jira features in a second.

3. Github

Github is probably the most popular social coding software around. Every developer knows about it. A free version allows you to create many public repositories, whereas paid versions give you more features, like privacy, etc. Paid versions start from $7/month. Github has the following features:

• Collaborative features with the ability to contribute as part of teams;
• Native clients for Mac, Windows and Mobile, so coding never stops;
• Perhaps the greatest open-source coding community on the planet;
• Git Powered Wikis for documentation and resources;
• Integrated Issue Tracking;
• Live code review;
• Comments on each line of code (commits in git), Start a conversation;
• Analysis of branches and comparison of source code for your project.

4. Cloud 9

Cloud 9 is a cloud based collaboration tool for developers. It is more like a cloud based IDE (integrated development environment). It has two plans – a free version with basic facilities and a premium version starting at $12/month. Cloud 9 is special because of its real time coding and chatting environment, allowing remote developers to communicate and code great projects more efficiently. Here is what Cloud 9 has to offer:

• It enables real time code editing and chatting – pair programming;
• You can pull in your project source code from a Github repository;
• True terminal access, like make, telnet, VIM;
• Runtime environment for Python and Ruby apps, Run apps on the cloud;
• File access via SSH, FTP;
• A great feature for rapid development, code completion;
• App deployment for Heroku, Cloud Foundry, Azure and more soon;
• Easy Go-to-file feature with multiple theme designs for code editing;
• Support for Git and Mercurial along with CLI.

These 4 collaboration tools for developers have their pros and cons, so the one you choose ultimately depends on your personal needs and preferences. Nonetheless, these cloud-based tools are very useful when it comes to collaborating with your geeky teammates, all within the comfort of a web browser. Try them out; who knows, you might just fall in love with one of them.