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?

Filaria

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 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.}

Conventionalize

Is this statement still valid? JFrogs sends email with this text inside: "As we noted previously, as of May 1, 2021 we will be sunsetting Bintray. Many of the services that Bintray provides are now served by the JFrog Platform and this sunset allows us to focus our development and innovation efforts on building a comprehensive end-to-end solution for hosting and distribution of software artifacts." To me it looks like JFrog is now some kind of superset of Bintray features? – Calcium