GitLab vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

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
Visual Studio
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Visual Studio (now in the 2022 edition) is a 64-bit IDE that makes it easier to work with bigger projects and complex workloads, boasting a fluid and responsive experience for users. The IDE features IntelliCode, its automatic code completion tools that understand code context and that can complete up to a whole line at once to drive accurate and confident coding.
$45
per month
Pricing
GitLabMicrosoft Visual Studio
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
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitLabVisual Studio
Free Trial
YesNo
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
GitLabMicrosoft Visual Studio
Considered Both Products
GitLab
Chose GitLab
Because with Visual Studio code, it was very easy for us to install GitLab in it and have easy access through the terminal and due to GitLab, it was easy to implement codes regarding API and AWS services to make our software better. Gitlens and all features help to check the …
Chose GitLab
Why we chose GitLab: we started long ago with free access and it was always good enough, so we never bothered to switch.
Chose GitLab
I liked GitLab better than Beanstalk. GitLab had a free option, which Beanstalk did not at the time. From what I have used of Bitbucket, I probably like it better than GitLab, specifically I like the design better. Doing things in Bitbucket seemed a bit slower to me though. Now …
Chose GitLab
GitLab is widely used throughout the developer community and provides all the required features industry wide. Many of the paid features help the team a lot to achieve efficient source code management. Many features like vulnerability management and AI chat while code review in …
Chose GitLab
GitLab has a open-source community and great documentation that provides support resources and community contributions. AWS CodeCommit is used for integration with other AWS services in the AWS ecosystem and also have a low community and support compared to GitLab hence …
Chose GitLab
It was a management decision to use GitLab over other tools. It integrates well with RBAC using Terraform. Runners are easy to setup. Almost all the features the organization used before are available in GitLab.
Chose GitLab
Git has a Distributed Model. SVN has a Centralized Model. In git every user has their own copy of code on their local like their own branch. In SVN there is central repository has working copy that also make changes and committed in central repository
Chose GitLab
  1. GitLab has all the necessary features that are required as part of modern software development life cycle.
  2. GitLab offers better pricing as compared to its competitors.
  3. GitLab is open-source as well.
Visual Studio

No answer on this topic

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User Ratings
GitLabMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(152 ratings)
9.0
(105 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(5 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(6 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(12 ratings)
8.8
(15 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GitLabMicrosoft Visual Studio
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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Microsoft
When working with base C# code for desktop and web projects, then Microsoft Visual Studio is ideal as it provides the libraries and interfaces needed to quickly create, test and deploy solutions. It is when slightly more complex scenarios are required that issues can arise. The built-in integration for things like PowerBI Paginated Reports and dashboards is far from ideal.
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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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Microsoft
  • I like how the tabs and panels are organized; everything is gathered together so you can find what you're looking for quickly.
  • If you can't find something, there's a thorough search engine that searches all of Visual Studio's features.
  • The Team Foundation Server feature is fantastic since it allows us to easily deploy and roll back changes on the server.
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
Microsoft
  • Would be great if there was a better way to save and restore open tabs.
  • The built-in test runner can be improved, for example, by adding the ability to save a set of commonly run tests, etc.
  • Better integration for Microsoft SQL server would be great.
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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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Microsoft
VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.
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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Microsoft
I love the overall usability of Microsoft Visual Studio. I’ve been using this IDE for more than 20 years, and I’ve seen it evolve by leaps and bounds. Today, with AI and code-suggestion/completion features, developers no longer need to remember countless libraries, methods, or language syntax, or invest a huge amount of programming effort to complete a project. It truly offers everything a developer needs to program, debug, test, and deploy in a single IDE.
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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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Microsoft
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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Microsoft
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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Microsoft
There are many resources available supporting Visual Studio IDE. Microsoft whitepapers, forum posts, and online Visual Studio documentation. There are countless demonstration videos available, as well. If users are having issues, they can call Microsoft Support, but depending on the company's agreement with Microsoft, the number of included support calls will vary from organization to organization. I've found that Microsoft support calls can be hit or miss depending on who you get, but they can usually get you with the right support person for your issue.
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In-Person Training
GitLab
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
IT is very complicated to understand all the functions that the environment has if you are not familiar with this type of development environments. It is important to select a good in-person training to achieve to understand all the possibilities and the capacity of the application. In this case, you will be able to develop a lot type of different applications.
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Online Training
GitLab
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
If you are not accustomed to develop in this type of development environments it would be complicated to follow all the parts of the course because if the course does not include a great tour with all the concepts to develop you will not have the option to understand all the functions.
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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
Microsoft
I personally feel Visual Studio IDE has [a] better interface and [is more] user friendly than other IDEs. It has better code maintainability and intellisense. Its inbuilt team foundation server help coders to check on their code then and go. Better nugget package management, quality testing and gives features to extract TRX file as result of testing which includes all the summary of each test case.
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Scalability
GitLab
I think is very well designed, and like any VCS it works as intended
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Microsoft
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
Microsoft
  • Using the integration between Visual Studio and our source control service, the cost of re-work and losing code is drastically reduced.
  • Paid versions of Visual Studio enable developers to be so much more productive than hacked-together open source solutions that it's hard to imagine developing in Windows without it.
  • When combined with support subscriptions and the vast array of free online help options available, Visual Studio saves our developers time by keeping them coding and testing, not wasting their time trying to guess their way out of problems or spend endless hours online hoping to find answers.
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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