GitLab vs. Linear

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

Linear is particularly well suited for teams that need a fast, intuitive way to organize and prioritize work across multiple projects. In my experience, it's been especially useful for tracking client work by priority, assignee, and project, while providing clear visibility into ownership and progress. Its clean interface makes it easy.

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

• Linear agent.
• Quick glance at current status of tickets.
• Allow customization to view only the relevant tickets and information for each user.

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

• Linear is missing documentation features like Jira Confluence. We can use Notion but it would have been great if Linear offered more comprehensive solution
• Eventhough we can manage releases with projects, it is hard to manage them when there are multiple projects being released at the same time. The initiatives feature kind of handles this but if we can assign tasks to a release that would be awesome
• Being able to invite guests without costing extra money. Platforms like Clickup allow you to invite a limited no of guests without costing extra money.
• Linear is not good if you are software services company and want to manage multiple client projects. Linear is built for product teams.

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

- As a combination of features and products, GitLab is a really great tool for developers. - Also, it comes with both light and quick changes in a web browser version, as well as pro work in VS Code mode. However, in certain areas, such as large-scale issues/incidents, management can be improved.

Incentivized

I already spoke to this in a previous question but, if you've ever used Jira, Linear should feel quite natural. It is a project management tool rooted in issues/tickets to which you can also add sub-tasks and various details. There is some customization but Linear has attempted to shape its offering as the most essential features necessary for this type of work.

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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

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

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

When we are using jira it felt light the application itself is very heavy usage and the UI feel like boring and features were not good as compared to Linear. As QA when shifted to Linear i felt huge difference in process of ticket creation and tracking compared to jira and sometimes Jira would get stuck, but Linear didn't.

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

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• 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

• Improved visibility into work across clients by providing a centralized view of tasks, priorities, and ownership.
• Increased team efficiency by replacing scattered personal task lists with a shared workflow.
• Helped prioritize high-impact work by organizing tasks by clients, priority and assignee.

Incentivized