GitLab vs. IntelliJ IDEA

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
IntelliJ IDEA
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
IntelliJ IDEA is an IDE that aims to give Java and Kotlin developers everything they need out of the box, including a smart code editor, built-in developer tools, framework support, database support, web development support, and much more.
$19.90
per month
Pricing
GitLabIntelliJ IDEA
Editions & Modules
GitLab Essential
$0
per month per user
GitLab Premium
$29
per month per user
GitLab Ultimate
$99
per month per user
For Individual Use (Monthly billing)
$19.90
per month
For Organizations (Monthly billing)
$71.90
per month
For Individual Use (Yearly billing)
$199
per year
For Organizations (Yearly billing)
$719
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitLabIntelliJ IDEA
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAll Products Pack (For Individual Use) – $299 /1st year, $ 239 /2nd year and $ 179 /3d year onwards All Products Pack (For Organizations) – $979 / year
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GitLabIntelliJ IDEA
Considered Both Products
GitLab
Chose GitLab
GitLab is an all-in-one Git and CI/CD platform that also offers generous credits in its free plan. It allows both private and public projects. The pipelines can be fully defined in YAML files put under version control.
Chose GitLab
GitLab is miles ahead of the competition. In so many words, having a simple UI with robust security and the ability to conduct Git actions takes the cake. The competitions like to say they can do these things easily but their products are more confusing and hard to use.
Chose GitLab
I tried GitHub in the past, and it was really similar as GitLab. But we prefer use GitLab for the cicd part, easier to handle
Chose GitLab
GitLab is free and open-source with all the functionalities you get with GitHub so it becomes an obvious choice for all the businesses to go with.
Chose GitLab
The company has had prior experience with Bamboo. GitLab has much more functionality than Bamboo and worked better with some of our legacy projects. While Jenkins is free, it really isn't free - the amount of work required to get something up and running would have been …
Chose GitLab
As a front-end to revision control workflows, all three products are similar. Bitbucket suffers from the usual problems with Atlassian: it's slow and bloated. GitHub is a viable alternative for these workflows; the choice is entirely dependent on organizational constraints. For …
Chose GitLab
GitLab is the best combination of all the other tools. They are still viable in their own sense, but for the projects we were using, GitLab proved to be an excellent alternative.
IntelliJ IDEA

No answer on this topic

Best Alternatives
GitLabIntelliJ IDEA
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Veracode
Veracode
Score 9.2 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Veracode
Veracode
Score 9.2 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GitLabIntelliJ IDEA
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(154 ratings)
9.7
(58 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(5 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(6 ratings)
9.2
(8 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(12 ratings)
8.9
(15 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GitLabIntelliJ IDEA
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.
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JetBrains
This is a superb tool if your project involves a lot of backend development, especially in Java/Spring Boot and Kotlin. The support for the front end is great as well, but some developers may prefer to use the GitHub copilot add-on. I especially love using the GitHub copilot add-on. It may be less appropriate if your project requires heavy use of HotSwaps for backend debugging, as sometimes the support for that can be limited.
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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.
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JetBrains
  • Unit testing: Fully integrated into IntelliJ IDEA. Your unit tests will run smoothly and efficiently, with excellent debugging tools for when things get tricky.
  • Spring integration: Our Spring project using Maven works flawlessly in IntelliJ IDEA. I know firsthand that Apache is also easily and readily supported too. The integration is seamless and very easy to set up using IntelliJ IDEA's set up wizard when importing new projects.
  • Customization: IntelliJ IDEA comes out of the box with a bunch of handy shortcuts, as well as text prediction, syntax error detection, and other tools to help keep your code clean. But even better is that it allows for total customization of shortcuts you can easily create to suit your needs.
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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.
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JetBrains
  • Finding if a feature exists or not in IntelliJ IDEA can be challenging.
  • For example, if we know how to format a particular file, the command is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+L, but if we don't, then finding it is difficult.
  • Setting up a project interpreter and directory structure might not be intuitive at first.
  • Git integration can be improved. For example, it isn't easy to rebase using UI in IntelliJ IDEA.
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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
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JetBrains
VS Code is maturing and has a Scala plugin now. The overall experience with VS Code - for web development at least - is very snappy/fast. IntelliJ feels a bit sluggish in comparison. If that Scala plugin for VS Code is deemed mature enough - we may not bother renewing and resort to the Community Edition if we need it.
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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!
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JetBrains
There is always room for improvement, but I haven't met any IDE that I liked more so far. Even if it did not fit a use case right out of the box, there is always a way to configure how it works to do just that.
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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
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JetBrains
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
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JetBrains
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
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JetBrains
Customer support is really good in the case of IntelliJ. If you are paying for this product then, the company makes sure that you will get all the services adequately. Regular update patches are provided to improve the IDE. An online bug report makes it easier for the developers to find the solution as fast as possible. The large online community also helps to find the various solutions to the issues.
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Implementation Rating
GitLab
No answers on this topic
JetBrains
This installs just like any other application - its pretty straight forward. Perhaps licensing could be more challenging - but if you use the cloud licensing they offer its as simple as having engineers login to the application and it just works.
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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
JetBrains
Eclipse is just so old, like a dinosaur, compared to IntelliJ. There are still formats that Eclipse supports better, especially old and/or propriety ones. Still, most of the modern software development needs can be done on IntelliJ, & in a much better way, some of them are not even supported on Eclipse.
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Scalability
GitLab
I think is very well designed, and like any VCS it works as intended
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JetBrains
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
JetBrains
  • Easier to find bugs and debugs, thus reducing man hours and generating immediate dollar impact.
  • Coding time is lessened, which in turn again reduces man hours and generates immediate dollar impact.
  • Refactoring code is more innovative and easy here, resulting in more maintainable code.
Read full review
ScreenShots

GitLab Screenshots

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

IntelliJ IDEA Screenshots

Screenshot of IntelliJ IDEA interface overview: the Project tool window (left) outlines the code structure and the Editor (right) is used to read, write, and explore the source code.Screenshot of IntelliJ IDEA analyzing the context. It then suggests the most applicable and relevant code.Screenshot of the Search Everywhere window, where users can search for files, actions, classes, symbols, settings, UI elements, and anything in Git, all from a single entry point.Screenshot of IntelliJ IDEA's support for frameworks with dedicated assistance for Spring and Spring Boot, Jakarta EE, JPA, Reactor, and other popular frameworks.Screenshot of the AI Assistant that provides features for software development. It can explain code, answer questions about code fragments, provide code suggestions, generate documentation, and commit messages.Screenshot of the interface to run queries, connect to databases, browse and export data, and manage schemas.