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GitLab

GitLab

Overview

What is GitLab?

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.…

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Recent Reviews

Solid and complete tool

9 out of 10
October 10, 2023
Incentivized
It's the main tool used to manage our git versioning, CI/CD, merge requests and repository for several of our projects. But we don't use …
Continue reading

Pipelines Rock

9 out of 10
October 03, 2023
Incentivized
Our organization has grown large enough such that managing individual projects is a bit of a pain. We try to delegate to our dev teams as …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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GitLab Essential

$0

Cloud
per month per user

GitLab Premium

$29

Cloud
per month per user

GitLab Ultimate

$99

Cloud
per month per user

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://about.gitlab.com/pricing?utm_me…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details

What is GitLab?

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 be achieved through a single platform with a user-friendly interface
  • Security: GitLab offers built-in security scans that provides a comprehensive security solution.
  • Transparency: The code base for GitLab is open to community contributions, to ensure transparency and an open-core approach.
  • Cloud-Agnostic: Can be deployed anywhere with no vendor lock-in

GitLab Screenshots

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

GitLab Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac, BSD* (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS or later), Android, iOS, full list see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/security/approved_os.html
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesInternational
Supported LanguagesChinese, English, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish

Frequently Asked Questions

GitLab starts at $0.

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

Reviewers rate Project Access Control and Branch Protection highest, with a score of 9.3.

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

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Reviews and Ratings

(347)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 80)
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Meet Dhruv | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
GitLab includes a built-in container registry that allows users to store, manage, and distribute Docker images directly in the GitLab environment and that makes the deployment of containerized applications simple and more reliable. GitLab supports single sign-on (SSO) integration with popular identity providers like LDAP SAML and OAuth that is secure and safe.
  • Version Control
  • Code Review
  • Project Management
  • Complex Customization
  • Support Response Time
  • Cost reduce
To develop the new checkout process team creates branches in GitLab's repository for each component. Each developer works on their respective branch and implement specific work. To manage all these branches team uses GitLab's flag capabilities. GitLab's built-in monitoring and feedback tools allow team to monitor the performance of the process in real-time and get the feedback from users.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Since I am a Drupal developer I use GitLab almost everyday to organize code related tasks (merge requests, forks, code search, pipelines etc).
For some of my Customers also I have to use GitLab as the main code repository. In this case GitLab was selected due to the self hosted option as also its open source culture.
  • Merge requests
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • Open Source
  • Integrations
  • Security
  • Code search
  • App performance
  • Code review
GitLab is currently suited for:
- Collaboration
- Open source projects
- Self hosted
- Advanced security (especially for large companies)
- Low badgets

On the other hand, GitLab is less appropriate for:
- External (3rd party) integrations
- Mobile usage
- Code search across many repositories
- Built in CI/CD actions
October 25, 2023

GitLab: Future of DevOps

Shivangani Tamrakar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We've started using GitLab in my organization for hosting git based repositories and slowly we've started using it for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and as soon as GitLab launched container registry, package registry and dependency proxy we started to use those as well and it went amazing, GitLab is well suited to us since now we have everything in a single platform.
  • Hosting Git Based Source Code Repositories
  • Container Registry, Package Registry, Infrastructure Registry and Dependency Proxy
  • Service Desk and Issue management on every project
  • CI / CD
  • As per my requirements currently I don't see any scope of improvement
We started to use GitLab for hosting git source code repositories of our projects only but slowly we started to use it to store container images, packages, dependency proxy as well infrastucture registry and it is now well suited for Continuous Integration in our projects, It wasn't that good in Continuous Deployment before 12.0 version but after 12.0 it is amazingly good for Continuous Deployment as well since it keeps deployment information in a well organized manner which can be configure in ci yaml configuration.
October 10, 2023

Solid and complete tool

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's the main tool used to manage our git versioning, CI/CD, merge requests and repository for several of our projects. But we don't use it for issues tracking in my team (we use Jira for that).
  • Merge requests
  • CI/CD
  • Repository tracking
  • Searching can be done in multiple places with different behaviors, so it's sometimes confusing
  • The merge request changes tab could have more info, like git history on some lines, highlighting partial changes in a single line, to replicate more closely what someone would see in an IDE
It's an excellent tool for tracking and navigating multiple repositories. For merge requests, the UI could include more info but I usually check-out the branch anyway. The search function is very advanced, but it has different behaviors depending on where you are in the tool, making it a bit confusing at times.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
we use GitLab for maintaining our code base online and we use it for keeping many different repos
  • CI/CD
  • Difference between previous and present code
  • Labels feature
  • scheduling in CI/CD
  • Editor of GitLab where we can insert tables also for mentioning overview
  • At times it's server is down so the changes pushed are not reflected at the same time. It should be faster and quick and changes should be visible at the same time
1. Best for maintaining different repos
2. can be integrated with Jira, slack, etc.
3 . CI/CD is awesome.
4. Editor for GitLab is good
October 03, 2023

Pipelines Rock

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization has grown large enough such that managing individual projects is a bit of a pain. We try to delegate to our dev teams as much as possible. Moving to something like GitLab, which is an essential infrastructure as code, has allowed us to speed up development. Their pipelines are really useful, though they can be a bit wonky with some keywords not playing nice with each other. It is really valuable to work with any arbitrary docker image, or even create your own.
  • Pipelines
  • Container Registry
  • Git Repository
  • Some keywords don't play nice with eachother and can conflict
  • YAML parsing can be a bit picky
Works really nicely for team to come up with their own pipelines and custom ci.
Oleksandr Torlo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The first time I got acquainted with Gitlab was in 2016 when we were developing a complex project of an online adaptive learning platform. We used the self-hosted version back then, and it's still used in this project. In the organization where I currently work, we first used BitBucket, but then I implemented GitLab and we successfully migrated to it. We use GitLab now not only for version control but also for automating uploads to servers.
  • Version control.
  • CI/CD.
  • Code review.
  • Access right management.
  • UI needs to be improved.
The undeniable advantage of Gitlab is in the features that are in the free version, including storing large files. Gitlab's downside is that it's a bit more complex than its well-known competitor.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As an electrical engineering student and HCI researcher, I utilize GitLab to address problems and streamline my work. GitLab provides version control for code; collaboration features for peer feedback and documentation capabilities for research organizations. It helps me manage my codebase, collaborate effectively, automate workflows, and maintain thorough research documentation, enhancing productivity and research outcomes.
  • 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.
  • GitLab's interface can sometimes be overwhelming, especially for new users. It would be great if they could make it simpler and easier to navigate, so people can get up and running quickly without feeling confused.
  • Sometimes struggles with performance when dealing with large repositories or heavy CI/CD workloads.
  • While GitLab supports various integrations, it would be fantastic if they expanded the list to include more tools and services.
GitLab is well suited for team collaboration, CI/CD automation, and version control in software development projects. However, it may be less appropriate for individual projects, non-code projects, or scenarios with limited resources or technical expertise.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use GitLab for storing our code repos as well as storing the applications that we use to test our product and test applications. We integrate GitLab with Jenkins, SonarQube, blueOcean, and a variety of other applications to ensure code quality in our CI/CD pipeline. We use GitLab to track changes to applications as well as have multiple versions. GitLab is great for version history as well.
  • Version history - having the ability to see when things were last changed and by who.
  • Integration with our other tools - to help ensure code quality.
  • Multiple repos.
  • Easy navigation.
  • Checking for duplications - we have ended up with two applications being the exact same for a while, and then one gets updated, and one doesn't cause issues.
I use GitLab to store our applications - GitLab makes it easy to make small changes in the online IDE and push changes to the rest of the team. We use GitLab to store our repos - Easy navigation between projects, and the versioning is top-notch. We integrated our CI/CD pipeline and GitLab, we manage code reviews, can track pipeline status, and if our integration tests fail, then the merge is blocked, which is great for not pushing code that will break our environments.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Gitlab is our source code repo. It's reliable and it has scaled as our usage and number of users has increased. We receive good customer support from Gitlab. The implementation to move over to Gitlab was fairly straight forward - we were able to moved over to Gitlab with very little impact to our user base.
  • Hosts our code repository
  • merge requests
  • container registry
  • Maybe tighter integration with Jenkins
GitLab is our code repository for many teams. It is what we use for merge requests. It has scaled very well as our company as grown. We have been able to on board new teams to GitLab pretty quickly. I would like to see a tighter integration with Jenkins - we are not currently using GitLab CI/CD.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In my organization, GitLab is the preferred code repository and collaborative development platform for DevOps software projects of all sizes. By utilizing GitLab, we have access to essential software development and security features including; branching, code committing, merge trains , code testing and coverage, continuous development and deployment (Ci/Cd) capabilities and so on. All of the aforementioned enables a centralized, integrated workflow for software development operations within my company, leading to faster collaboration and deployment of software projects.
  • Continuous integration - GitLab has enabled my team automate all critical steps required to test , build and ensure code security and quality. By automating this process, we limit manual interventions to minimum levels, leading to faster software deployment.
  • Unit test reports - This makes it easier and faster to identify faults within our merge requests, without the need to manually check our software delivery pipeline.
  • Continuous software security - GitLab enable us integrate security and compliance testing into our software development processes. This helps to promptly identify and manage potential vulnerabilities within software deployments.
  • Documentations can be more intuitive and elaborate.
  • Integration with third party software programs is inadequate.
Continuous Integration (CI): GitLab's robust CI capabilities makes it an ideal choice for automating critical steps involved in testing, building, and ensuring code security and quality. With GitLab CI, my team has been able to define pipelines that automatically trigger various stages of the software development process, such as compiling, testing, and deploying code changes. Thus , minimizing manual interventions and accelerating the software deployment cycle, leading to faster releases. Continuous Software Security: By incorporating security scans, vulnerability assessments, and code quality checks into our CI/CD pipelines, GitLab has helped to identify potential security vulnerabilities early within the software development lifecycle. This proactive approach enables prompt mitigation of security risks and ensures that our software deployments are secure and comply with known coding standards.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We host our app code on it- the app is on microservices so GitLab provide us a space to push our code in different environments also its part of our ci cd pipeline which means it s used in delevery automation thus GitLab is very crucial in our work flow
  • Host code
  • Brach management
  • Review code
  • Ci/cd
As said its a crucial part of our product delevery which means it s allow us to share code with everyone in the team and manage branches to be pushed to master and after that enters in our jenkins pipeline where we analyse code and deploy it to our prod environment
Miguel Campos Ribau | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
GitLab is used as the main devops platform for many teams in our organization to manage both internal and client projects. We use it as a central repository to version control and collaboratively develop cloud solutions, applications and internal systems. For clients, it is mainly used to develop IaC for AWS infrastructure. Internally, a good example of how we use GitLab is in our time tracking system.
  • Version control
  • Integration with Visual Studio Code
  • Continuous deployment to AWS
  • Ease of troubleshooting
  • Remote log ins
  • Cost
GitLab is well suited for large teams that needs to collaboratively develop complex applications, either for internal projects or for clients. From experience, GitLab is also well suited to develop infrastructure as code in the AWS ecosystem. It has good version control, an efficient interface to merge requests and a good integration with external tools.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use GitLab for source code management - we store our source code or also configuration files in repositories and work on them together. Most used functionalities are branching, committing, creating merge requests. This helps us to work together on the same code base without having trouble with consistency or bringing everything together. Also, GitLab pipelines are used for building and deploying images based on our source code. Before every build, we do some automated checks (e.g. lint, bandid, etc.) to ensure that our code has a good and consistent quality and security risks are scaled down. When the code passes the checks, the pipeline builds the code, creates an image and deploys the code to test, dev or production environments. This helps us to deploy much faster, with less errors and better code.
  • Source code management and historicization
  • Easy to learn
  • Visualization of pipeline progress
  • Merge requests
  • Wiki
  • Groups and repos for a good structure
  • Build-in Visual Studio Code Editor
  • Search functionality for words inside source code
  • Possibility to define extra roles for user management to improve security
  • Performance optimization under heavy usage
I work with GitLab since years and it's a huge help in my daily work as software developer. In our team, we manage source code and configuration files in GitLab and work on them together. The amount of people working on a project can differ from 1 to 20 but with the functionalities of GitLab, we hardly have any problems! We use branching, mostly using the concept of GitLab flow, and it works like a charm even when more people work on the same file. Merge requests are very helpful and easy to handle even when there are conflicts - the UI as well as the CLI handling for that are really easy to learn.

Also pipelines are such a great tool to make the lifecycle of an application much faster while also taking care of code quality! Our pipelines check our code for unused variables / methods, the coding style and also scans for security risks to ensure a good code quality. Also we build our images with it and deploy on different environments without the need to do any manual work. There's really not much which is bad about GitLab in the area of source code & config management.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
GitLab allows us to manage our source code into different groups. It improves code readability and efficiency, for example, with the Web IDE, which is a good feature. We are also using Gitlab CI, which is very efficient and well-integrated. We centralize users into Gitlab, and we used SAML to get them into other apps that we used within our stack (for example, SonarQube).
  • Source code management.
  • Continuous integration.
  • Merge requests flow.
  • Users management.
  • 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.
Once you have some code source to manage, Gitlab is a good choice. You don’t need to use all features to have a good experience with Gitlab. For example, if you are using another tool for CI and another tool for tickets, you can easily integrate them into Gitlab. But of course, using Gitlab CI and the integrated issues tool improve the user experience and enable the full flow that is available.
Anubhav Singhal | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
GitLab is used for all the repositories management in our product team, all the dev , and qa , and devops repos arr managed in GitLab. It is also used for ci and cd purpose. The pipelines in GitLab are used for automated testing of the new build and all pushes to the GitLab branches.
  • Repo management
  • Ci/cd pipeline
  • Code editor in merge request
  • Navigating through diff menus
  • Pipeline timing
  • Integration with other tool
Its a great tool for ci cd pipeline and there are so many features which can be used by devops and developers, the git repo management is mature. And big enterprise level team can use it
Axel Somerseth Cordova | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
GitLab is awesome for business projects it has a clear user interface when you are in an organization.We have some of our repositories hosted on GitLab because we love GitLab CI/CD. With this tool you can integrate your software in a smooth way, you can deploy it also.I love one special feature on GitLab CI/CD: I am able to define a base Job and then extend it with something called "Job Inheritance". This feature is powerful because we can take all the common steps on a job and then add other specific steps to achieve our goals. Our pipelines are like highways where our code get deployed.
I also like wikis feature to share relevant information with my teammates.
Other feature I enjoyed a lot is the commit graph log. We can view our commit history in a visual way. This help us to know if we have a linear or a parallel commit history.
My teammates also enjoyed the environments and review apps features. I worked great with Firebase Hosting. So we were able to test our integration in an isolated environment without deploying to production.
I think GitLab has a great CI/CD tooling.
  • CICD
  • Commit History
  • Review Apps
  • GitLab self-managed runners
  • Integrations with hosting services
  • GitLab VS Code extension
If you are working on a business project, you should consider GitLab because they have a powerful CI/CD tooling.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
GitLab was implemented as a development and operations tool for handling code environments for multiple user access and updates. Also, for all the teams to manage and access the same development environment at the same tie for different approaches and methodologies on performing a particular task updates and changes if any.
  • Deployment
  • Operations and Task Management
  • Authenticity
  • Improvised access and functionality
  • More efficient and fast deployment
  • Server updates
  • Dashboard navigations can be quicker
Gitlab is best suited in areas where the development and production environment if not all set up and collaborated at once. It enables the team for remote working and enhancement and deployment of applications and management. However, there can be possible server issues and other authenticity and integrity factors, but they can also be tackled easily for an efficient workspace management.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
To host the jombay application codebase and collaboration with the team.
Developers fork the repos and send Pull Requests for merging code
  • Works really well
  • UI is simple and aligns a lot with GitHub
  • Its pretty Fast
  • Nothing major as such
GitLab has features and pricing structures for all types of use cases under DevSecOps domain. Pricing is slightly on a higher side though if you go with the Premium and Ultimate plans
Rogerio Taques | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Since the beginning, Gitlab was heavily used to manage since the software development process, tracking issues, deployment automations and source-control. It is a complete all-in-one tool that can be easily adopted across the an entire product division. I have used it with Abtz Labs and also introduced it to other companies where I've been working as consultant.
  • Issues tracking
  • Source-code management
  • CI/CD
  • Configuration can be overwhelming some times
Companies of any size can get started with Gitlab for free and pay as they go, if needed. With Gitlab, in general, you don't need another tool to run a software development business/team.
December 21, 2022

GitLab Gits It Done!

James Baca | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For people who are software developers, GitLab is top tier. In our office, where software development is a skill that is not our specialty, the UI of GitLab helps out immensely for projects big and small, and important and not. It can manage our product and automating deployment with very few, if any, errors. It's very useful to brings members of the team together for one project.
  • Flexibility for novice users
  • So many sources for help with Support and the Community who use it
  • Easy collaboration on projects
  • Few pesky bugs here and there, but nothing major
  • Forgiving UI, but also really slow UI
  • Dashboards should show analytics
During the pandemic, like so many other companies, we had a heck of a time brining people together to work on the things we need to work on. Once our team got on the same page, Gitlab allowed people collectively to work on a lot of projects just like we were all next to each other. I think the software is built for collaboration like that.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used the GitLab solution whithin many clients information systems for :
- code management / code repository
- Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery
I also installed GitLab as a self hosted service on-premise, on the cloud and also use the SaaS version
  • Code repository
  • Git flow & Merge requests
  • Web IDE
  • Premium version / licence policy
  • Integration with other services (ex. jira)
  • Backup and recovery scripts
I would definetly recommand GitLab having a free solution that allows all kinds of companies to have a self-hosted solution for code managemenent, CI/CD and users management.
It also provides integration with Active Directories and other ticketing software
Mohit Prasad | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Gitlab is a great tool for the GIT repository and Continuous Integration/ Continuous Deployment. We normally use this for keeping track of the website changes, automated testing, and deployment of the site on the server. The automated build process also helps to integrate recent technologies easily, with seamless team collaboration.
  • Git Repo Management.
  • CI/CD
  • Automated testing.
  • initial Setup.
  • Community
  • Security
Initial team collaboration was very difficult before the Gitlab integration. There is no code version maintained by the developer leading to problematic situations when actual deployment needs to be done. The initial setup was a learning curve, but the overall integration helped to work with the team. The CI/CD pipeline also helped to easy deployment.
October 27, 2022

#GITLAB

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Started working with GitLab since 2017 to solve the deployment and regular build related issues. Git help us to automate Deployment with Less build error. Earlier we're using SVN and every time Deployment was taking too much time.
  • Helped to automate build with 0 versioning related issue
  • Helped in continuous Development and build
  • More control on MR with User control
  • We can control who can merge and when to automate build
  • Facing issues with Conflict resolving
  • More control on branch merge
  • Show info regarding from where branch was created while reviewing
October 20, 2022

Easy and Simple to use

Subramanian Kuthalingam | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used GitLab for VCS, Project Management, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery - CI/CD Of Dev-Ops practice in agile method to execute the complex software development solution implementation to manufacturing industry with multiple stakeholders (end user, BA, Solution Architect, PMO, Developer, Tester, Deployment Engineer) bring every one same page on the progress of the project. This is one stop solution for VCS, CI/CD and DevOps requirements
  • Real-time status update thru Task & Issue Tracker and developer collaboration
  • GitLab offers push request rules, merge request approvals and merge request drafts, and protected branches. Similarly, it provides simple migration from previous GIT providers to GitLab.
  • Manage projects faster and better, there are planning tools available such as issues, task lists, assignees to projects, and time tracking. Supervision of general business performance
  • Automated merge requests when CI/CD succeeds, and DevOps reports point to areas of improvement.
  • Security measures, the platform proposes code quality reports, vulnerability management, Infrastructure as Code Security Scanning, Dynamic Application Security Testing, and Dynamic API Security Testing.
  • Dashboard needs improvement with analytical insights
  • SLA tracking need more granular functionality
  • Integration with third party tools
  • Pricing is very high
Git Lab supports a full DevOps cycle. DevOps is an approach to creation in which developers and operations have a constant communication flow. Easy to use and simple & straightforward without complexity. Collaboration with multiple teams and spread across in different countries. This is an open source code product which can be more useful for private instant related requirements
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