GitLab vs. Red Hat OpenShift

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
GitLab
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
GitLab is an intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, where software teams enable AI at every stage of the software lifecycle to ship faster. The platform enables teams to automate repetitive tasks across planning, building, securing, testing, deploying, and maintaining software.
$0
per month per user
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.
$0.08
per hour
Pricing
GitLabRed Hat OpenShift
Editions & Modules
GitLab Free (self-managed)
$0
GitLab Free
$0
GitLab Premium
$29
per month per user
GitLab Premium (self-managed)
$29
per month per user
GitLab Ultimate
Contact Sales
GitLab Ultimate (self-managed)
Contact Sales
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitLabRed Hat OpenShift
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsGitLab Credits enable flexible, consumption-based access to agentic AI capabilities in the GitLab platform, allowing you to scale AI adoption at your own pace while maintaining cost predictability. Powered by Duo Agent Platform, GitLab’s agentic AI capabilities help software teams to collaborate at AI speed, without compromising quality and enterprise security. If usage exceeds monthly allocations and overage terms are accepted, automated on-demand billing activates without service interruption, so your developers never lose access to AI capabilities they need. Real-time dashboards provide transparency into AI consumption patterns. Software teams can see usage across users, projects, and groups with granular attribution for cost allocation. Automated threshold alerts facilitate proactive planning. Advanced analytics deliver trending, forecasting, and FinOps integration.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GitLabRed Hat OpenShift
Considered Both Products
GitLab
Chose GitLab
GitLab is easily the preferred tool when it comes to versioning and source control. With other tools the UI often feels outdated and clunky leading to inefficiency and confusion. With some of the sleeker tools such as GitKraken, while the aesthetic is pleasing, the experience …
Red Hat OpenShift
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Even though Red Hat OpenShift has more overhead than many other Kubernetes flavors, we have selected Red Hat OpenShift because of it's focus on Security and because of it's excellent vendor support.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
None, and OpenShift was the only supported platform for some of our software.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
From what I remember of Pivotal Cloud Foundry/Tanzu, OpenShift has a lot more features. Ultimately, our team went with OpenShift. After trialing multiple providers, we decided OpenShift was the best experience. We also had more confidence in Red Hat.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Open Source and i like Red Hat before VMware
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
The biggest reason we chose Red Hat OpenShift is because of our partnership and contract agreement with them. With our needs, were able to get assistance when we need it which is imperative in our area of work.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift's differentiator is the Infrastructure Management (CoreOS) that brings a high level of stability of the platform.
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
The management of a cluster from a rhel instance is quite good. The support is complete for all the needed tools. I choose Red Hat OpenShift because the impact that it has is more notorious on non-IT teams across the company, like BI teams or developers without infrastructure …
Chose Red Hat OpenShift
Kubernetes is a part of OpenShift, but it can be deployed in a standalone state. On the plus side, it's significantly cheaper as there are no licensing costs. On the minus side, there's no simplified orchestrator. While Kubernetes is an orchestration platform itself, it's …
Features
GitLabRed Hat OpenShift
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
GitLab
-
Ratings
Red Hat OpenShift
8.4
323 Ratings
8% above category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings8.5274 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings9.3308 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings8.2289 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings8.4261 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings8.3290 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings8.4272 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings8.5282 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings8.3269 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings7.9283 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings7.9278 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings8.4284 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GitLabRed Hat OpenShift
Small Businesses
GitGuardian
GitGuardian
Score 9.0 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Veracode
Veracode
Score 8.7 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Veracode
Veracode
Score 8.7 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GitLabRed Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(152 ratings)
9.1
(252 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(5 ratings)
8.9
(25 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(6 ratings)
8.5
(10 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
5.5
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.6
(124 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(12 ratings)
6.9
(9 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(3 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
GitLabRed Hat OpenShift
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
Red Hat
Red Hat OpenShift, despite its complexity and overhead, remains the most complete and enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform available. It excels in research projects like ours, where we need robust CI/CD, GPU scheduling, and tight integration with tools like Jupyter, OpenDataHub, and Quiskit. Its security, scalability, and operator ecosystem make it ideal for experimental and production-grade AI workloads. However, for simpler general hosting tasks—such as serving static websites or lightweight backend services—we find traditional VMs, Docker, or LXD more practical and resource-efficient. Red Hat OpenShift shines in complex, container-native workflows, but can be overkill for basic infrastructure needs.
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
Red Hat
  • We had a few microservices that dealt with notifications and alerts. We used OpenShift to deploy these microservices, which handle and deliver notifications using publish-subscribe models.
  • We had to expose an API to consumers via MTLS, which was implemented using Server secret integration in OpenShift. We were then able to deploy the APIs on OpenShift with API security.
  • We integrated Splunk with OpenShift to view the logs of our applications and gain real-time insights into usage, as well as provide high availability.
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
Red Hat
  • I wouldn't necessarily say there is look everyday technology transform. I can see a trend wherein Red Hat OpenShift is adopting all the new technology trends and helping their customers align with their priorities and the emerging technology trends. I wouldn't call out various scope for development every day. There is scope for development. It is all how the organizations adopt it and how they deliver it to their customers. I don't want to call out there is scope for development. It's happening. It is a never ending process.
  • At the moment, I don't have anything to call out. We are experiencing Red Hat OpenShift and we can see every day they're coming up with new features as and when they come up with new features, we want to experience it more and more. We are looking for opportunities wherein this can be leveraged to help our users and partners.
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
Red Hat
This is the current strategy for the company, most of the products in the organisation are aligning to Openshift and various use cases it support. Also lot of applications are being developed for AI use case, openshift.AI provides opportunity to host and leverage the AI capabilities for these applications
Read full review
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
Red Hat
As I said before, the obserability is one of the weakest point of OpenShift and that has a lot to do with usability. The Kibana console is not fully integrated with OpenShift console and you have to switch from tab to tab to use it. Same with Prometheus, Jaeger and Grafan, it's a "simple" integration but if you want to do complex queries or dashboards you have to go to the specific console
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
Red Hat
Redhat openshift is generally reliable and available platform, it ensures high availability for most the situations. in fact the product where we put openshift in a box, we ensure that the availability is also happening at node and network level and also at storage level, so some of the factors that are outside of Openshift realm are also working in HA manner.
Read full review
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
Red Hat
Overall, this platform is beneficial. The only downsides we have encountered have been with pods that occasionally hang. This results in resources being dedicated to dead or zombie pods. Over time, these wasted resources occasionally cause us issues, and we have had difficulty monitoring these pods. However, this issue does not overshadow the benefits we get from Openshift.
Read full review
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
Red Hat
Their customer support team is good and quick to respond. On a couple of occassions, they have helped us in solving some issues which we were finding a tad difficult to comprehend. On a rare occasion, the response was a bit slow but maybe it was because of the festival season. Overall a good experience on this front.
Read full review
In-Person Training
GitLab
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
I was not involved in the in person training, so i
can not answer this question, but the team in my org worked directly
with Openshift and able to get the in person training done easily, i did not
hear problem or complain in this space, so i hope things happen
seamlessly without any issue.
Read full review
Online Training
GitLab
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
We went thru the training material on RH webesite, i think its very descriptive and the handson lab sesssions are very useful. It would be good to create more short duration videos covering one single aspect of openshift, this wll keep the interest and also it breaks down the complexity to reasonable chunks.
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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
Red Hat
The Tanzu Platform seemed overly complicated, and the frequent changes to the portfolio as well as the messaging made us uneasy. We also decided it would not be wise to tie our application platform to a specific infrastructure provider, as Tanzu cannot be deployed on anything other than vSphere. SUSE Rancher seemed good overall, but ultimately felt closer to a DIY approach versus the comprehensive package that Red Hat OpenShift provides.
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
GitLab
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
It's easy to understand what are being billed and what's included in each type of subscription. Same with the support (Std or Premium) you know exactly what to expect when you need to use it. The "core" unit approach on the subscription made really simple to scale and carry the workloads from one site to another.
Read full review
Scalability
GitLab
I think is very well designed, and like any VCS it works as intended
Read full review
Red Hat
This is a great platform to deployment container applications designed for multiple use cases. Its reasonably scalable platform, that can host multiple instances of applications, which can seamlessly handle the node and pod failure, if they are configured properly. There should be some scalability best practices guide would be very useful
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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
Red Hat
  • That is a complicated question and one that's not easy for me to answer. There's a lot of factors that go into all of the stuff that we just don't have an easy way of measuring. And we realize that while we're implementing Red Hat OpenShift, we've tried to start measuring some of that stuff, but we don't have a baseline to go on. So it's hard to say. What I can tell you is general experience with the platform has been extremely positive from the development aspect. Teams have been very, very happy with the speed at which they're able to do stuff. They've been happy with that. The way it works in one environment is exactly the way it works in the next environment because we don't have configuration drift, that type of thing, and has had very positive impacts. But we didn't have a baseline to start with. So I can't talk about getting there faster or anything like that.
Read full review
ScreenShots

GitLab Screenshots

Screenshot of What is Intelligent Orchestration for DevSecOps?Screenshot of an overview of GitLab Duo Agent PlatformScreenshot of a new agent creation screen