airfocus vs. GitLab

airfocus is a scalable platform, very useful for any organization, especially for our IT department since it facilitates decision making, helps to establish different priorities, and helps to execute your sprints easily in a simple and visual way.

Incentivized

We started to use GitLab for hosting git source code repositories of our projects only but slowly we started to use it to store container images, packages, dependency proxy as well infrastucture registry and it is now well suited for Continuous Integration in our projects, It wasn't that good in Continuous Deployment before 12.0 version but after 12.0 it is amazingly good for Continuous Deployment as well since it keeps deployment information in a well organized manner which can be configure in ci yaml configuration.

Incentivized

• Product prioritization was made simple by compiling stakeholder input on projects to determine the proper order to execute differing projects. Priority poker-like features are a huge timesaver.
• Creating roadmaps could not be easier in airfocus. Creating new projects is intuitive and you can customize settings that allow you to automatically add projects to the overall roadmap. There are a number of choices for the roadmap templates also which is nice depending on individual product managers' needs and expertise.
• Perhaps the most useful feature(s) of airfocus are the collaboration tools. The ability to build out product roadmaps with the entire team's input saves countless hours of in-person prioritization meetings and has made refinement meetings with engineering team go much more smoothly.

Incentivized

• GitLab excels in managing code versions, allowing easy tracking of changes, branch management, and merging contributions.
• It helps maintain code stability and reliability, saving time and effort in the development or research workflow.
• Powerful code review features, enabling collaboration and feedback among team members.
• Robust project management features, including issue tracking, kanban boards, and milestones.

Incentivized

• Can be expensive to give everyone access
• Integrations could be more precise and powerful

Incentivized

• CI variables management is sometimes hard to use, for example, with File type variables. The scope of each variable is also hard to guess.
• Access Token: there are too many types (Personal, Project, global..), and it is hard to identify the scope and where it comes from once created.
• Runners: auto-scaled runners are for the moment hard to put in place, and monitoring is not easy.

Incentivized

Gitlab is the best in its segment. They have a free version, they have open-source software, they provide a good service with their SaaS product, they are a fully-remote company since the beginning (which means they are fully distributed and have forward-thinking IMO). I would certainly recommend them to everyone.

Incentivized

I find it easy to use, I haven't had to do the integration work, so that's why it is a 9/10, cause I can't speak to how easy that part was or the initial set up, but day to day use is great!

Incentivized

They answered every single question we had in a timely fashion and furthermore, they went out of their way to make sure we had all the time we needed to fully evaluate the product. I think the fact that they truly valued customer feedback to improve the product made them feel more like a partner then just an off-the-shelf solution

Incentivized

At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft

Incentivized

It's easy to use, it's customizable. It is ideal for managing multiple product lists, it is transparent and helps keep any work team centralized. It has an intuitive interface, special to track the time to our established goals.

Incentivized

GitLab is easily the preferred tool when it comes to versioning and source control. With other tools the UI often feels outdated and clunky leading to inefficiency and confusion. With some of the sleeker tools such as GitKraken, while the aesthetic is pleasing, the experience is plagued by a lack of support, lack of optional plugins, and a plethora of bugs that cause unnecessary legwork to resolve. GitLab is the best of both aesthetic and functionality

Incentivized

• We know exactly what the impact/effort is of our projects, so we don't waste time on projects or features that won't drive meaningful revenue or increased brand affinity.

Incentivized

• We were able to streamline our project's codebase which made us very organised and laid out a proper plan for development.
• Our deployment and infra pipelines are well structured now making our process 10x faster.
• We are more focused into project building rather infra, as infra is totally on autopilot mode. Which has enabled us to grow our ROI by records.

Incentivized