Upsource

» see jetbrains.com/upsource as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Upsource was JetBrains selling the thing it was uniquely able to sell. Every other code review tool in 2014 compared text; Upsource ran the same static analysis engine as IntelliJ IDEA over the repository, so it could tell you that a review introduced a probable null dereference rather than that four lines had changed. It browsed and reviewed Git, Mercurial, Subversion and Perforce repositories, and you ran it on your own server. Version 1.0 went on sale on 9 December 2014.

The market it was built for closed underneath it. Pull requests moved into GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, review became a tab next to the code instead of a separate product with its own hostname and its own license key, and a standalone review server became a thing you had to justify. JetBrains said as much when it announced the end, describing an industry trend away from standalone code review tools and toward integrated ones.

~ the dossier ~

~ end of sales, end of life ~

The notice was posted to the Upsource blog on 31 January 2022. New licenses and renewals stopped the next day, 1 February 2022. Technical support and critical security updates continued for exactly one more year and ended on 31 January 2023. Anyone holding a perpetual license could keep running the software forever, unsupported, which a certain kind of team absolutely did.

~ the chain of successors ~

Upsource customers were directed to JetBrains Space, the company's combined hosting and review platform. On 27 May 2024 JetBrains announced that Space would not continue either, and stopped selling it the following day. Space and its replacement were discontinued on 1 June 2025, with cloud organizations deactivated on that date and support ending on 31 May.

The replacement is the detail worth recording. SpaceCode was announced in May 2024 as the narrower product Space would become, focused on Git hosting and review, which is roughly what Upsource had been doing in 2014. It was discontinued in November 2024, before it ever reached general availability. Three JetBrains products covered this job across eleven years and none of them is on sale now.

~ the gravestone ~

The page at lp.jetbrains.com/upsource still answers. It is four lines long and reads: Upsource has been shutdown. Upsource reached the end of life. Please use jetbrains.team for Code Browsing and Review. That hostname serves a page titled Space, the product JetBrains discontinued in June 2025, so the gravestone is still forwarding visitors to something that also stopped.

I have had a JetBrains IDE open most working days for years and never once touched Upsource. This was never a matter of taste. An IDE is a tool you choose for yourself, while a self-hosted review server is a purchase somebody else makes for the whole team, usually whoever owns the build infrastructure. On every team I joined where review was taken seriously, it happened wherever the repository already lived, which is precisely the shift that killed this product.

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