GitLab is the best CI/CD tool for medium sized businesses
June 14, 2021
GitLab is the best CI/CD tool for medium sized businesses
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with GitLab
GitLab is the CI/CD tool we use across our company. We originally were using Stash, which was provided by Atlassian, but felt there were many lackluster features and learned they planned on deprecated the project. GitLab is the response for all our code creation needs, from code reviews, testing, automation tests, and releases. We depend on the tool and without it, would be left without a way an efficient way of creating new features or fixing issues for our product.
- UI is straight forward and easy to use
- GitLab's documentation feels complete and explains many edge cases
- GitLab's open source community is strong and active
- GitLab could improve some of the confusion around how permissions work (sometimes unclear why one user can do an action, but not another)
- GitLab should provide a way to rerun a merge pipeline, without rerunning the original Merge Request pipeline
- When jobs fail, it would be awesome if every user could see the information on the runner and the versions of the software it is running on (to better debug the issue)
- GitLab has allowed us to customize our build pipelines so they run as quickly as possible.
- GitLab has made it easy for us to adjust permissions and invite people to teams without much help from other stakeholders.
- GitLab has reduced the number of issues with the CI/CD section of our business, which causes fewer production issues overall.
Even though all three tools are also useful for their own merit, we found GitLab to be the best supported and most customizable for our needs. It is useful to know that the product today is what we need it to be and the community is there to keep it updated if we need more features in the future. On top of this, GitLab is a newer tool that allows our team members to approach it with an open perspective and not be stuck in our old ways in the previous platforms (in our case, Stash).
As a developer at my company, I do not personally interact with the security features of GitLab on a day-to-day basis. From my assumptions, we would be using whatever they provide to protect the instances. As to access the instance, we log in using SSO and we host the instance behind a VPN. That way, we are protected against people getting access to the instance without having a company login.
Overall, GitLab has everything we need to share our code, review it and make sure it's completed tested before it ends up in our production branches. In our scenario, each merge request has all the steps needed to make sure the code is cleaned, using JEST and Cypress to run tests against the code to prove it is valid. Once it ends up in the production branch, it automatically deploys the code to our AWS instance and we can deploy directly from GitLab for production. When we do deployments, because of GitLab, we have high confidence in our releases and move as quickly as we can.
Do you think GitLab delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with GitLab's feature set?
Yes
Did GitLab live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of GitLab go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy GitLab again?
Yes