Q: What are GitLab's top competitors?

JFrog Artifactory , Jira Align , and Jenkins are common alternatives for GitLab.

Q: What is GitLab's best feature?

Reviewers rate Branch Protection highest, with a score of 9.2.

Q: Who uses GitLab?

The most common users of GitLab are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).

Help Desk

Web and Video Conferencing

Customer Support

Changelog

Mind Mapping

Development

Audit

Business Intelligence (BI)

Calibration Management

Collaboration

Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS)

Embedded Business Intelligence (BI)

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Enterprise

Accounting

Payment Gateway

Finance and Accounting

Applicant Tracking

Corporate Learning Management

Employee Onboarding

HR Management

Payroll

Recruitment Automation

Succession Planning

Talent Intelligence

Talent Management

Workforce Analytics

Workforce Management

Human Resources

Cloud Storage

Data Observability

Desktop Outsourcing

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

Fraud Detection

IT Service Management (ITSM)

Industrial IoT

Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)

Managed Print

Metadata Management

Network Access Control (NAC)

Network Function Virtualization (NFV)

Network Performance Monitoring

Relational Database Management Systems

Remote Support

Security Awareness Training

Solid State Drives

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Traffic Switching

Virtual Private Network (VPN)

VoIP Monitoring

Information Technology

A/B Testing

Ad Serving & Retargeting

All-in-One Marketing

Business Card Scanning

Content Management

Digital Analytics

Email Management

Email Marketing

Marketing Automation

Marketing Resource Management

Presentation

Real-Time Interaction Management

Social Media Management

Survey & Forms Building

Video Streaming

Web Analytics

Webinar

Marketing

Business Caller ID

Project Management

Professional Services

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Lead Generation

Sales Email Tracking

Sales

Certificate Lifecycle Management

Security

Forestry

HIPAA Compliance

Home Health Care

Insurance Agency Management

Vertical-Specific

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GitHub

Atlassian Bitbucket

Atlassian

Jenkins

Open Source

CircleCI

SonarQube Server

Sonar

Harness

AWS CodePipeline

Amazon AWS

TeamCity

JetBrains

Opkey (now with pCloudy)

Opkey

Top Rated awards to be awarded in April 2022.

Top Rated 2022

Top Rated 2020

Top Rated 2021

Best Of Feature Set 2021

Top Rated awards to be awarded in April 2023

Top Rated 2023

Best Of Feature Set awarded in Summer 2022

Best Of Feature Set Summer 2022

Best Of Relationship awarded in Summer 2022

Best Of Relationship Summer 2022

Best Of Value Summer 2022

Best Software Overall 2022

Best Software Small Business 2022

Best Software Mid-Sized 2022

Best Software Enterprise 2022

Best Of Feature Set awarded in Winter 2023

Best Of Feature Set Winter 2023

Best Of Relationship awarded in Winter 2023

Best Of Relationship Winter 2023

Best Of Value Winter 2023

Top Rated awards to be awarded in April 2024

Top Rated 2024

Best Of Relationship 2023

Best Of Feature Set 2023

Best Of Value 2023

Buyer's Choice 2025

JFrog Artifactory

Jira Align

Azure DevOps Services

Kubernetes

Atlassian Jira

HashiCorp Terraform

Puppet Enterprise

Cloud-Based UI and Git Integration: Users have praised the cloud-based UI of GitLab for supporting Git version control, allowing local checkout, and enabling multiple developers to work simultaneously in one file. The reduction of code conflicts and enhanced collaboration are highlighted benefits of this feature.

Integration Features: Reviewers highly value the integration of GitLab with version control, code review, and project management features. They find it easy to configure GitLab runners for running tests and defining permissions using Terraform, which streamlines their development processes effectively.

CI/CD Capabilities: Users find the CI/CD pipelines, merge requests, and open-source nature of GitLab beneficial for their development workflows. They appreciate the platform's integrations with other tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, and Toad. Additionally, they praise its security features for ensuring a safe software deployment environment.

Steep Learning Curve: Users have found the software's functionality vibrant but challenging to understand, indicating a steep learning curve that hinders quick adoption and proficiency. This complexity may lead to delays in fully utilizing the software's capabilities and may require additional training or support.

Lack of Intuitive Help Documentation: Some reviewers have expressed feedback on the need for more intuitive and comprehensive help documentation to assist with navigating the software's features effectively. The absence of clear and user-friendly guidance materials could result in users struggling to find solutions independently, impacting their overall experience.

Integration Challenges with External Tools: There are notes from users highlighting difficulties in integrating with external tools and complex customization features, suggesting a need for simplification to streamline workflows. These integration challenges can disrupt workflow efficiency and hinder seamless collaboration across different platforms and tools.

GitLab Essential

GitLab Premium

GitLab Ultimate

Yes, in the project we used GitLab utlimate paid plan which comes with various security features. Some of them are defined below: GitLab detects security vulnerabilities that include unauthorized access or data leaks. This will directly appear in the data merge requests such that necessary actions can be taken to avoid it.

Working in a project with multiple developers, GitLab really helps to share the code and track the development process. Before merging the code changes, raising a pull request (PR) helps to check the quality of the code and improve it. If the code pushed is breaking something, GitLab will not allow the merge.

Information Technology & Services

Cumulations Technologies

Software Developer

Yes, we are using GitLab's paid plan for one of our clients. It's very easy to implement both SAST and DAST in the GitLab CI. GitLab provides SAST for multiple languages like Java, python, js, etc. DAST is also available which is based on OWASP ZAP. We can see the scan reports on the dashboard.

This feature is widely used in our organization. Each and every project is now running with CI and being built after every commit. We are also managing the CD from GitLab as it can be integrated with a variety of cloud providers. CI can also be used for code testing and scanning.

Computer Software

GeeksRadar

Senior Consultant

It provides multiple security checks such as secret detection, registry detection, Static Application Security Testing while using CI\CD.

It helps in faster Build creation for our plugin development which helps in removing dependency related issues as well as provide build check related to styles and naming conventions which provides easy implementation of CI\CD pipelines.

Architecture & Planning

Yes, we have been using Gitlab Ultimate, and while we are uncertain if the pricing will scale with additional developers, we have been very pleased with the SAST, DAST, and Container Scanning that comes with our plan. We have very limited resources with regard to time, so the Ultimate plan has given us a leg up in staying compliant with our ISO 27001 and SOC 2 standards while maintaining a trim team. It's invaluable.

Our Terraform projects are deployed directly from Gitlab, and we are pleased to use their managed TF State file. We no longer need to manage an S3 backend with a DynamoDB component to keep our state from drifting. It also manages all the security that comes with managing an IaC product. We also deploy all of our SPA applications and ECS Fargate containers directly from our Pipelines. It's our one-stop shop.

Financial Services

Lumos Data

Senior Data and Security Engineer

Yes we are having a gitlab plan to manage private repos but sorry i am not having too much information about that.

Yes i checked this feature just for the demo project, But we are not using in any one of our projects, Because we are not having this type of the requirement. We are having our separate applications. Why the way this feature is very helpful for the apps which is using same modules in different projects.

Freelancer

Freelancer Android Developer

They don’t use a paid plan, but it does have security alerts.

I love it because of its agents. To run pipelines. Team management is good because you can assign the right roles.

DigitalOnUs

DevOps Engineer

I'm pretty sure the DevOps team have used the security features because we got some international security certifications but I do not know the specific security features of GitLab that the company has used.

In our GitLab projects we have pre-merge and post-merge pipelines. In the pre-merge pipelines we have jobs to verify static analysis, unit tests, feature tests, e2e tests, secrets detection, style verification, building verification, and we also check that before merging to any of the main stages, the code is already merged into the previous stage.

Ingenious.Build

Full-stack Developer

We have not yet used GitLab's paid plans, although we have been looking into that, and will consider it possibly in the near future, if our use cases warrants it.

We have not yet enabled continuous integration into our practices. We are actively discussing the possibility and are working through the details of it. We are trying to shift the mindset of our users, and to adhere to DevOPS best practices, but still have a ways to before that happens. But it is in our future plans

Government Administration

SAIC

System Administrator

The paid plan is more on the security feature. We are very happy that Gitlab provide Secret Detection. This feature scans code for sensitive information like API keys or passwords that may have been accidentally committed. Our business is very sensitive about the security especially our clients are Fortune 500's big financial institutions, we can not let unauthorized user/system to access our API or our client API. Some developer may accidentally put the secret hard coded in the source code. Gitlab can help to prevent security breaches. That's a very useful feature.

Merge Conflicts is a big headache when we doing integration. We need to integrate all the developers code daily so Gitlab provide automatic testing so we will not allow our developer work on long branches. So if the developers have potential conflicts are flagged and resolved earlier in the process, leading to smoother collaboration. This CI feature is great that GitLab provided.

Clearstreet

Architect

We are using Gitlab paid plan but I haven't identify security vulnerabilities in my code.

Increased developer productivity and faster time-to-market by streamlining collaboration, code review, CI/CD pipelines.

Amazon

Lead Consultant

Yes, it provides secure shell to connect with the local computer, for transfering and managing version of code.
Also the feature of securing particular branch in codebase, helps in avoiding unnecessary commits by any users.

This feature helps to work in collaborative way.
Proper UI shows who have made changes in the codebase and also helps in code reviews by creating pull request.

cars24

Software Engineer

We have large number of people in our team who are working on The same feature. Using GitLab We have successfully achieved the cicd approach As everyone works on their local copy, then pushes the code onto the feature branch, then, after being reviewed, a pull request Is created, which then merge the court to the main branch. Earlier, this process was land and their deployment was not on a frequent basis as It required large number of changes and human effort, which has subsequently reduced talk to using GitLab

Information Services

Wipro

Team lead

We are using a paid plan but no, we have not used any of the security features as we have our own solutions we are using.

Yes, we heavily used the CD part of GitLab for creating and testing builds.

It is way easier to use the GitLab CD functionality than other competitor products because their API is way easier to use, and the errors from GitLab were more intuitive, so it's faster to iterate setting pielines up.

Also, the pipeline code is small and logical, so it's easier to read and maintain.

Entertainment

We don't consider GitLab's security features to be comprehensive enough for us but they provide an easy way to keep track of outdated libraries with known security issues as well as scanning for base images in Dockerfiles. The vulnerability scanning and remediation capabilities are not always as robust or real-time as other specialized security tools on the market, leaving potential gaps in detecting and fixing security issues promptly. The easy integration of other security tools allows for more complex security use cases we can't outline here in detail

The continuous integration features allow us to integrate changes on a single branch and validate the code by running a suite of tests before the merge happens. After merging the code a deploy to a UAT environment is triggered and performed automatically. Testing of tickets happens on UAT environment and release are done from the branch that contains all integrated changes multiple times per week.

Pharmaceuticals

We did not use gitlab security features, we did however integrate gitlab with other solutions such as sonarqube and secured the infrastructures on the technical level (ex. remove internet access on the project level, expose the service on a restricted internal network).
Note that you can deploy other security solutions to your code / pipelines to check for passwords

GitLab continuous integration solution is used whether in a self-hosted, on premise or SaaS version. Note that for new users on the SaaS version (starting around 3 years ago), GitLab no longer provides free runners since the feature was being abused by crypto miner. I myself still have free runners on the SaaS version since my account is old. On the self hosted version, you have to deploy specific runners (can be achieved with SaaS version as well). Along with gitlab web IDE, the Merge Requests UI and the CI logic it makes it accessible to get started with continous integration.

We have not gone through the Paid Plan feature yet but have used the branch protection feature which helped us to prevent unauthorized merges of code and The two-factor authentication feature also helps to protect Git from any random user accessing it. The dependencing feature is also used sometimes but it has many limitations as we didn't had paid plan.

In our team when one developer creates a merge request then CI pipeline runs itself to check and validate the changes before merging and the pull request helps the other developer to check that changes merged can affect their code changes or not. CI also can be integrated into various tools which helps us to check the code quality and security functioning

GitLab

Overview

What is GitLab?