Article Introduction

This document provides a high-level overview of the Phabricator project.

What is Phabricator?

Phabricator (pronounced like the word fabricator) is a suite of web applications which make it easier to build software, particularly when working with teams. Phabricator is largely based on Facebook's internal tools.

The major components of Phabricator are:

• Differential, a code review tool; and
• Diffusion, a repository browser; and
• Maniphest, a bug tracker; and
• Phriction, a wiki.

Phabricator also includes a number of smaller tools.

Why use Phabricator?

Phabricator gives you a box of solid tools for a comparatively small setup cost. The tools all work together and are richly integrated. The whole thing is free and open source. You own all your data. Phabricator is extremely fast and proven to scale both to large datasets (Facebook has 500,000+ commits across many repositories) and large organizations (Facebook has 500+ fulltime engineers). Phabricator's tools are easy to learn, understand, and use.

However, Phabricator may also not be a good solution for you:

• If you develop primarily on Windows, you are likely to find integration with the toolsets you use lacking.
• If you don't use SVN, Git or Mercurial, you'll have to add support for your VCS before you can get anywhere.
• If you loathe PHP, well, it's written in PHP. Sorry. It is a victim of circumstances. We assert it is well-written PHP, at least.

Next Steps

Continue by:

• installing Phabricator with the Installation Guide.