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Assembla vs Google Code
March 15, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
4★
Assembla workspaces allow to accelerate software teams. Ticketing and issue management, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Wiki, and other collaboration tools to accelerate development. Unite your team with a single activity stream view.
6★
Google Developers is now the place to find all Google developer documentation, resources, events, and products. Project Hosting on Google Code provides a free collaborative development environment for open source projects.
Assembla and Google Code were both online platforms where developers could store their precious, often buggy, source code while pretending they had everything under control. They both let users track issues, which was a fancy way of saying "keeping a public list of things that are broken." Both emerged in the mid-2000s when the internet was still young and full of hope and both assumed that software development could be neatly organized with wikis and version control. This, of course, was an optimistic view, much like thinking a spaceship with a "Don't Panic" sticker would prevent total disaster.
Assembla, hailing from the United States in 2005, had grand ambitions of serving commercial software developers, which is to say, people who wanted to make money while trying to keep their codebases from collapsing under their own weight. It embraced not just SVN but also Git, Perforce and Mercurial—because why limit yourself to one way of making a mess when you could have several? Unlike its competitors, it threw in fancy extras like time tracking, collaboration tools and a general air of trying to be useful rather than just free.
Google Code, on the other hand, arrived in 2006 with the noble goal of supporting open-source projects, which is a bit like handing out free sandwiches in a city where everyone has already started bringing their own. It favored SVN at first, dabbled in Git and Mercurial later and then quietly wandered off in 2016, muttering something about GitHub taking over the universe. It also had Google-specific integrations, which meant that if you squinted hard enough, you could pretend your project was one step away from global domination—until Google decided it had lost interest, as it often does.
See also: Top 10 Source Code Management tools
Assembla, hailing from the United States in 2005, had grand ambitions of serving commercial software developers, which is to say, people who wanted to make money while trying to keep their codebases from collapsing under their own weight. It embraced not just SVN but also Git, Perforce and Mercurial—because why limit yourself to one way of making a mess when you could have several? Unlike its competitors, it threw in fancy extras like time tracking, collaboration tools and a general air of trying to be useful rather than just free.
Google Code, on the other hand, arrived in 2006 with the noble goal of supporting open-source projects, which is a bit like handing out free sandwiches in a city where everyone has already started bringing their own. It favored SVN at first, dabbled in Git and Mercurial later and then quietly wandered off in 2016, muttering something about GitHub taking over the universe. It also had Google-specific integrations, which meant that if you squinted hard enough, you could pretend your project was one step away from global domination—until Google decided it had lost interest, as it often does.
See also: Top 10 Source Code Management tools
