Gitlab

Likelihood to Recommend

Gitlab is great for small companies looking for a cheap solution for hosting a large number of private repositories. It helps if you have experience with dev-ops tooling, as you may have to build some third-party integrations you would otherwise get out of the box with GitHub. It's also great if there is a possibility you would wish to migrate your repositories to a self-hosted network.If you're an independent developer or organization whose main goal is to build a community around your open source projects, I would recommend choosing GitHub over Gitlab as the community is much larger and involved over at GitHub.

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Brian Dentino

Founder

finbox.ioInternet, 1-10 employees

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Pros

Pipelines: Gitlab Pipelines is an excellent way to get started with pipelines easily and without much overhead. And with it being all encapsulated within Gitlab itself, it makes integrating your code into that pipeline even easier. Just a little bit of code and VOILA. You have at least a minimum viable pipeline.
VCS: Gitlab is, of course, a great version control system.
Usability: Gitlab has really put a significant amount of focus into usability. They've drilled down and ensured that the way companies and individuals need to use the tool, they can.
Groups: Gitlab makes setting permissions on projects extremely easy. Other version control systems make it more difficult to set things granular enough, but gitlab allows you to group things in a granular enough way for your projects.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Information Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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Cons

Third-party integrations. Many developer tools integrate deeply with GitHub, but lack support for Gitlab. Gitlab does have webhook support so it's possible to build your own integrations, but this can be time-consuming.
Gitlab's main competitor (GitHub) has a massive social network of coders and hosts nearly all popular open source projects. If you are looking for this type of community, Gitlab may not be for you.
Customer support & reliability. In the time I've used Gitlab, it's not uncommon to experience hours-long periods of downtime without any announcement or indication from the support team when it will be available again.

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Brian Dentino

Founder

finbox.ioInternet, 1-10 employees

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Usability

Gitlab 8.0

Based on 2 answers

The web console management is superior and I would have given Gitlab a 10, but sometimes it is hard to find documentation about a configuration setting in the gitlab.rb configuration file. As we move everything to code that means moving our CVS tools to code as well - and Gitlab to code. The usability of Gitlab from the end user's perspective is superior and the usability from the operations team is very good and getting better but there could be a little improvement in the gitlab.rb config file layout and documentation.

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Kevin Ritchey

Managing Member

ZenPan Technology Solutions, LLCInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

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Support

Gitlab 7.4

Based on 7 answers

I haven't contacted customer support because I haven't had any problems with Gitlab. Their service has been outstanding.I know they have a very active Twitter account in which they provide very quick updates. As far as I know the community is pretty happy with their service.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Information Technology and Services Company, 1-10 employees

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Alternatives Considered

GitLab was more affordable than GitHub and served the same purpose. The newer, cleaner and fresher design/UX of GitLab was an attractive point for us switching everything to GitLab. The built-in Web IDE is a very nice feature to edit your files online which GitHub did not offer when we were looking to switch products. We've used the groups and sub-groups for the repository as it helps to manage the repositories easily with user assignment, permissions, etc.
GitLab just makes it easier.

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Thomas Ketchell

Chief Executive & Co-Founder

SutoriPrimary/Secondary Education, 1-10 employees

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Return on Investment

Project management has improved deployment, communication, and productivity by keeping everyone on the same page.
Highly customizable with continuous integration, which means there's no need to connect multiple services together to achieve the desired result.
Easy to setup and work on multiple projects simultaneously.

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