Apache Subversion vs. Git vs. GitLab

It's a relatively simple version control system so it works great for an individual or small team (less than 10 people). But if you have a medium to large team, especially one with members distributed over a large geographic area, or one where individuals need to be able to work "offline" without access to a central server, Apache Subversion will likely not be the best choice.

Also, if you're maintaining an open-source project where outside people will be interacting with your code repository, git is probably a better choice because it's becoming the de-facto standard these days and what most developers are familiar with.

Incentivized

GIT is good to be used for faster and high availability operations during code release cycle. Git provides a complete replica of the repository on the developer's local system which is why every developer will have complete repository available for quick access on his system and they can merge the specific branches that they have worked on back to the centralized repository. The limitations with GIT are seen when checking in large files.

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GitLab is good if you work a lot with code and do complex repository actions. It gives you a very good overview of what were the states of your branches and the files in them at different stages in time. It's also way easier and more efficient to write pipelines for CI\CD. It's easier to read and it's easier to write them. It takes fewer clicks to achieve the same things with GitLab than it does for competitor products.

Incentivized

• Revision control done properly - you have end to end visibility of all changes in the project.
• Conflict resolution - visually highlighting the differences helps to track down the problem.
• Being open source and very popular.
• We are using SVN hosted in our network - it is very stable, we had almost zero downtime in 4 years.
• Rollbacks are made simple and easy to use.

Incentivized

• Ability to create branches off current releases to modify code that can be tested in a separate environment.
• Each developer had their own local copy of branches so it minimizes mistakes being made.
• Has a user-friendly UI called Git Gui that users can use if they do not like using the command line.
• Conflicts are displayed nicely so that developers can resolve with ease.

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

• Distributed development - I've never worked in an environment where distributed development (developers widely scattered geographically) was a factor, but that's why git exists.
• Merging - Merging of code from one branch to another can be painful, especially if it's not done frequently. (On the other hand, doing merges is one of the reasons I get a nice salary, so I can't complain too much!)
• Acceptance - Let's face it, git is what "all the cool kids are using." If you've got a bunch of developers fresh out of school, they'll probably know git and not Subversion.

Incentivized

• There can be quite a number of commands once you get to the advanced features and functionality of Git. Takes time to master.
• Doesn't handle static assets (ie: videos, images, etc.) well. Although in the recent years, new functionality has been introduced to address this.
• Many different GUIs, many people (including myself) opt to just use the command-line.

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

While there are interesting alternatives, such a GIT, Subversion has been a breath of fresh air compared to its predecessors like CVS or Microsoft Source Safe (now called Team Foundation Server). Its ease of use and high adoption rate is going to keep me using this product for years to come.

Git has met all standards for a source control tool and even exceeded those standards. Git is so integrated with our work that I can't imagine a day without it.

Incentivized

I really feel the platform has matured quite faster than others, and it is always at the top of its game compared to the different vendors like GitHub, Azure pipelines, CircleCI, Travis, Jenkins. Since it provides, agents, CI/CD, repository hosting, Secrets management, user management, and Single Sign on; among other features

Incentivized

Git is easy to use most of the time. You mostly use a few commands like commiting, fetch/pull, and push which will get you by for most of time.

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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!

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I've never had experienced outages from GItlab itself, but regarding the code I have deployed to Gitlab, the history helps a lot to trace the cause of the issue or performing a rollback to go back to a working version

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GItlab reponsiveness is amazing, has never left me IDLE. I've never had issues even with complex projects. I have not experienced any issues when integrating it with agents for example or SSO

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I am not sure what the official Git support channels are like as I have never needed to use any official support. Because Git is so popular among all developers now, it is pretty easy to find the answer to almost any Git question with a quick Google search. I've never had trouble finding what I'm looking for.

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

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It's easy to set up and get going.

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Git has become the new standard of version control, with its support for distributed design. As a tool to manage and control versions, Subversion does it well, but Git is the future.

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I've used both Apache Subversion & Git over the years and have maintained my allegiance to Git. Git is not objectively better than Subversion. It's different.
The key difference is that it is decentralized. With Subversion, you have a problem here: The SVN Repository may be in a location you can't reach (behind a VPN, intranet - etc), you cannot commit. If you want to make a copy of your code, you have to literally copy/paste it. With Git, you do not have this problem. Your local copy is a repository, and you can commit to it and get all benefits of source control. When you regain connectivity to the main repository, you can commit against it. Another thing for consideration is that Git tracks content rather than files. Branches are lightweight and merging is easy, and I mean really easy.
It's distributed, basically every repository is a branch. It's much easier to develop concurrently and collaboratively than with Subversion, in my opinion. It also makes offline development possible. It doesn't impose any workflow, as seen on the above linked website, there are many workflows possible with Git. A Subversion-style workflow is easily mimicked.

Incentivized

Gitlab seems more cutting-edge than GitHub; however, its AI tools are not yet as mature as those of CoPilot. It feels like the next-generation product, so as we selected a tool for our startup, we decided to invest in the disruptor in the space. While there are fewer out-of-the-box templates for Gitlab, we have never discovered a lack of feature parity.

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I think is very well designed, and like any VCS it works as intended

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• Subversion helps us feel secure in maintaining access to all of our product code, both current and historical.
• Being free and open source makes it an even better "investment".

Incentivized

• Git has saved our organization countless hours having to manually trace code to a breaking change or manage conflicting changes. It has no equal when it comes to scalability or manageability.
• Git has allowed our engineering team to build code reviews into its workflow by preventing a developer from approving or merging in their own code; instead, all proposed changes are reviewed by another engineer to assess the impact of the code and whether or not it should be merged in first. This greatly reduces the likelihood of breaking changes getting into production.
• Git has at times created some confusion among developers about what to do if they accidentally commit a change they decide later they want to roll back. There are multiple ways to address this problem and the best available option may not be obvious in all cases.

Incentivized

• GitLab cut down our spent on container, package and infrastructure registry
• Best thing is we can now have everything in single platform which cost effective too
• Quality of support is really good and they do have emergency support team as well which is great

Incentivized