Thanks for the question, it’s a good one!
The main difference between artifactory and bintray is in the intended usage. Artifactory is a development-time tool, while Bintray is a release, distribution-time tool. It might look like a subtle difference, but it has a great impact on the feature set of the products:
-
For development, you need features like:
- support for snapshots
- CI servers metadata integration (a.k.a. build-info)
- promotion between repositories
- on-prem install
- development site replication
- integration with enterprise security systems like SAML
- etc.
-
For distribution, you need stuff like:
- a global distribution network (CDN)
- extreme throughput and redundancy for downloads
- permission control for external users (entitlements)
- product and EULA support
- etc
As you can see, those are quite different lists.
Of course, there are common requirements:
- full REST API automation
- CLI
- plugins for popular CI servers and build tools
- indexing as much binary packages standards as possible
- “Set Me Up” snippets for easy configuration
- smart checksum-based binary storage
- and of course there must be a simple way to roll out the artifacts from the
development-time tool to the distribution tool (a repository in
Artifactory that is synced with Bintray)
and we have all that covered of course 🙂
I am with JFrog, the company behind bintray and artifactory, see my profile for details and links.