F5 Distributed Cloud App Stack vs. GitLab

F5 Distributed Cloud App Stack is quite straightforward with the UI and you can expose the features you want. This simplifies the experience for non-admins

Incentivized

In general it's a good product with a huge number of features. It can do CI/CD checks, deployment, repo hosting, integrations etc. A lot of it can be managed from just the UI but also has an ok API. It does tend to release new features semi-often too which is nice. It can have a steep learning curve for certain features so not a starter-friendly vendor, but great for most businesses.

Incentivized

• Complex cloud configurations.
• WAF and DDoS protection.
• Automation and workflow integration.

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

• It's still a little early so the app feels foreign to our ops teams
• I would like to customize the UI so I can visually see if I'm in Prod or Dev based on background colors
• Templates are a little awkward to create

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

once we get the hang of it and able to use it effectively, we are able to try out different application ideas without affecting existing infrastructure

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

I gave F5 Distributed Cloud App Stack this usability rating because, in my experience, the F5 Distributed Cloud App Stack product meets all the expectations

Incentivized

GitLab is very useable even new hires are not getting a hard time learning it. You can clone the repository with different options, pushinh and pulling branches are a breeze. Giving code review is intuitive, posting comments and comparing changes on the code doesn't give you a hard time since it's very readable.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

F5 Distributed Cloud App Stack's support team is very responsive

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

F5 Distributed Cloud App Stack's partner provided services are excellent

Incentivized

Incentivized

GitHub is an inferior product from most points of view. We had to use it and the teams finds no positives about it. Everything is a downgrade from our previous GitLab solution. GitLab CI\CD is vastly superior to workflows, for example doing a manual node is just "when : manual" in GitLab while you have to do clickops in GitHub to achieve the same. No overview of code in branches is a minus when we tried to figure out what our colleagues are trying to merge as it looked off.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• The WAF can be resource intensive in some 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