GitLab vs. Portainer

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
Portainer
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Portainer is a centralized container management platform for containerized apps and IoT device management. It helps accelerate container adoption and reduce time-to-value on Kubernetes, Docker, and Swarm with a management portal, allowing users to deliver and manage containerized applications from the data center to the edge. Portainer helps - Reduce the operational complexity associated with multi-cluster management Bridge the skills gap and facilitate feature…
$0
Pricing
GitLabPortainer
Editions & Modules
GitLab Essential
$0
per month per user
GitLab Premium
$29
per month per user
GitLab Ultimate
$99
per month per user
Portainer Business - 3 Nodes Free
$0
Home & Student
$149
per year
Starter
$995
per year
Professional
$2995
per year
Enterprise
Contact Sales for Pricing
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitLabPortainer
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GitLabPortainer
Considered Both Products
GitLab

No answer on this topic

Portainer
Chose Portainer
  • Ease of use
  • ability to deploy docker compose
  • Cost
Features
GitLabPortainer
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
GitLab
-
Ratings
Portainer
8.3
94 Ratings
4% above category average
Security and Isolation00 Ratings8.590 Ratings
Cluster Management00 Ratings8.475 Ratings
Storage Management00 Ratings8.380 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization00 Ratings7.883 Ratings
Discovery Tools00 Ratings8.570 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging00 Ratings8.290 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GitLabPortainer
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Veracode
Veracode
Score 9.1 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Veracode
Veracode
Score 9.1 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GitLabPortainer
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(154 ratings)
9.0
(94 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(5 ratings)
9.1
(3 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(6 ratings)
8.4
(15 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(12 ratings)
9.1
(3 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GitLabPortainer
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
Portainer
Many developers, especially lesser experienced developers, don't have a really good background in setting up containers from the command line. Portainer is invaluable to them. Giving a UI to them gives them much more confidence and allows them to learn properties and capabilities of containers under far less stress. On the flip side of this, giving then a UI on a production system can lead to chaos...never give junior developers access to production servers.
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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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Portainer
  • Separating server maintenance with application development, providing a clear user interface for developers who don't want to worry about the underlying server.
  • RBAC for container deployment linked to a SAML IDP, not something particularly easy in a native Docker instance but point and shoot in Portainer, allowing the use of Azure / Okta etc to provide user access.
  • Image management with multiple repositories is super clear and reduces incidents
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
Portainer
  • When setting up static IPs for a new container, having the used ones for a specific network at hand would be cool or something like a mini IPAM of some sort...
  • Using the developertools to see "oh, it's a 40x or 500" when something doesn't seem to load because the ui just states "Didn't work" is kinda annoying. expandable toasts or something would be nice.
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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
Read full review
Portainer
It is an excellent tool.
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!
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Portainer
Accessibility for Non-Experts: even with some people having a bit longer on-boarding it is still very simple Quick setup is insanely useful, we can get it running in 10 seconds after installing docker Portainer has once again super clean UI and is very user friendly. Deployment/monitoring and management are super easy. I can tell just from a glance if something is out of date (watching at you Watchtower not doing your job for some reason)
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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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Portainer
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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Portainer
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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Portainer
One of their staff members jumped on a video call immediately with me and led me through the problem and solution during a quick session of screen sharing. In this day and age that is above and beyond, especially when it comes to software. It took approximately 5-10 minutes to diagnose and fix, including pleasantries!
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Implementation Rating
GitLab
No answers on this topic
Portainer
It is really easy. Just follow the documentation.
Read full review
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
Portainer
Portainer takes the cup in terms of usability and features. It is also more useful for smaller deployments, whereas Kubernetes in our opinion and experience, could probably be more suited to certain other use cases. Portainer is also a fresh feel among all the preexisting container management solutions and brings positivity and a new breeze in the industry.
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Scalability
GitLab
I think is very well designed, and like any VCS it works as intended
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Portainer
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
Portainer
  • Increased productivity: Portainer's user-friendly interface and streamlined container management can help increase the productivity of IT teams.
  • Cost savings: By simplifying container management, Portainer can help reduce the time and resources required to manage container environments, potentially leading to cost savings.
Read full review
ScreenShots

GitLab Screenshots

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

Portainer Screenshots

Screenshot of Portainer is a universal container management platform to help adopt and manage Docker, Kubernetes, Nomad and Edge environments.