What is the difference between JFrog Artifactory and Bintray?

Question

I have been using JFrog Artifactory for a while in my company. Recently I learned about JFrog Bintray. What is the difference between Artifactory and Bintray? Is Bintray a replacement for Artifactory?

Answer 1

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 subtile difference, but it has 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.}