GitLab vs. Grafana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
GitLab
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
GitLab DevSecOps platform enables software innovation by aiming to empower development, security, and operations teams to build better software, faster. With GitLab, teams can create, deliver, and manage code quickly and continuously instead of managing disparate tools and scripts. GitLab helps teams across the complete DevSecOps lifecycle, from developing, securing, and deploying software. Differentiators, as described by Gitlab: Simplicity: With GitLab, DevSecOps can…
$0
per month per user
Grafana
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$0
Pricing
GitLabGrafana
Editions & Modules
GitLab Essential
$0
per month per user
GitLab Premium
$29
per month per user
GitLab Ultimate
$99
per month per user
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitLabGrafana
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GitLabGrafana
Considered Both Products
GitLab
Chose GitLab
  • GitLab was chosen for the auto dev ops feature over GitHub, but then GitHub shortly then came out with GitHub Actions.
  • We also moved from GitHub enterprise to GitLab, so cost-wise was cheaper as we didn't have to host GitLab.
  • GoCD was too slow and restrictive for our liking.
Grafana

No answer on this topic

Features
GitLabGrafana
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
GitLab
-
Ratings
Grafana
8.2
7 Ratings
0% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings7.77 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings8.77 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings8.37 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
GitLab
-
Ratings
Grafana
7.9
6 Ratings
1% below category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings7.76 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings8.36 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings7.46 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
GitLab
-
Ratings
Grafana
8.4
6 Ratings
1% above category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings8.16 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings8.76 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings8.36 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings8.46 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings8.76 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
GitLab
-
Ratings
Grafana
8.5
6 Ratings
7% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings8.66 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings9.06 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings8.36 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings8.14 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GitLabGrafana
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Veracode
Veracode
Score 9.2 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Veracode
Veracode
Score 9.2 out of 10
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 8.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GitLabGrafana
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(144 ratings)
9.4
(7 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.9
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(5 ratings)
9.7
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(11 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GitLabGrafana
Likelihood to Recommend
GitLab
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.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation
Read full review
Pros
GitLab
  • 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.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
  • Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
  • Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
  • Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
  • Microservices monitoring
  • Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
Read full review
Cons
GitLab
  • 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.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
  • There are some settings which we can't configure from UI (Web Console).
  • We've open[ed] up configuration files in command line text editors and manually do the settings e.g. LDAP/SSO configuration.
  • In terms of visualization, it's best, but it doesn't support log analysis otherwise it could destroy business of all other visualization tools.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
GitLab
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
Read full review
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Usability
GitLab
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!
Read full review
Grafana Labs
It is infinitely flexible. If you can imagine it, Grafana can almost certainly do it. Usability may be in the eye of the beholder however, as there is time needed to curate the experience and get the dashboards customized to how it makes sense to you. I know one thing they are working on are more templates, based on data sources
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
GitLab
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
Read full review
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Performance
GitLab
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
Read full review
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
GitLab
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
Read full review
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
GitLab
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.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.
Read full review
Scalability
GitLab
I think is very well designed, and like any VCS it works as intended
Read full review
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
GitLab
  • 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
Read full review
Grafana Labs
  • Grafana has replaced many higher priced tools
  • The integrations are seemless with multiple backends
  • Combining graphs and dashboards from multiple data sources is a game changer
Read full review
ScreenShots

GitLab Screenshots

Screenshot of GitLab, a comprehensive DevSecOps platform.Screenshot of Security DashboardScreenshot of Merge Request