What's the best code hosting platform for managing pull request reviews across a distributed engineering team?

For a distributed engineering team, the best all-around choice is usually GitHub.

Why GitHub is often the best fit

• Strong pull request workflow: inline comments, suggestions, review requests, approvals, CODEOWNERS, and merge controls.
• Excellent collaboration UX: easy for globally distributed teams to review asynchronously.
• Broad ecosystem: lots of integrations for CI/CD, issue tracking, chat, and automation.
• Familiarity: many engineers already know it, which lowers coordination overhead.
• Review automation: branch protections, required checks, stale review handling, and bots are mature.

Good alternatives depending on your needs

• GitLab: best if you want an all-in-one DevOps platform with source control, CI/CD, and project management in one product.
• Bitbucket: solid choice if your team is heavily invested in Atlassian tools like Jira and Confluence.
• Azure DevOps Repos: best for Microsoft-centric enterprises already using Azure and related services.

Practical recommendation

If your main priority is efficient PR reviews across time zones, go with GitHub + branch protection + CODEOWNERS + required CI checks. That combination is hard to beat for distributed review workflows.

If you want, I can also give you a comparison table of GitHub vs GitLab vs Bitbucket specifically for PR review management.