Gitlab, the best on-premise Git hosting you can get
Updated September 27, 2020

Gitlab, the best on-premise Git hosting you can get

Willian Molinari | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Gitlab

Gitlab was used by the entire engineering team (developers and operations) to hold all the code for all our projects. It was installed on-premise since we had 1000 projects to hold. All teams throughout the company used it on a daily basis to share code and discuss merge requests and issues.

Pros

  • Great interface for merge requests and issues.
  • Great community. It's easy to interact with and propose new stuff.

Cons

  • Used Gitlab community edition for years and it solved all my complaints during these years.
  • We were using Gitorious a long time ago and Gitlab helped us to get rid of it. Gitorious was really old and unmaintained, so we gave a new life to our developers.
  • We had to do our own packaging for the first versions because their Debian package was really bad at the time. Our package still remains to this time, but theirs are really better now.
Gitlab has a free version on-premise install, which makes it the best between them. Gitorious was our solution between Gitlab but it was abandoned for a long time. GitHub doesn't have a free version for private repositories. Bitbucket was not so good at the time and on-premise was not an option.
I only use the free version, tried the paid version but did not need it after all. For this reason, I don't have much to comment on the paid version of Gitlab.
Continuous integration is probably the best feature of Gitlab. The main Git hosting is great, but the way they do CI is awesome. Gitlab was one of the first to introduce CI and it was available for their own installation and also the open source version. I used both and they work great. I have nothing but positive things to say about it.

Do you think GitLab delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with GitLab's feature set?

Yes

Did GitLab live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of GitLab go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy GitLab again?

Yes

In case you have many repositories and want some on-premise, Gitlab is the best thing you can get. For new startups looking for a great a great (or free) place to have private repositories, Gitlab is the best option you will find as well. It also has an integrated CI for your project, which is really nice.

Collaboration and Performance

Yes, it certainly makes. Currently, I'm using Gitlab to host the source code for one of my clients and it certainly makes the code easy to collaborate. We use the full feature set: code hosting, CI, pull requests, etc. The interface is very clean and makes everything obvious for all developers. The fact that we can configure the CI via yml file in the source code is another plus.
I had the chance to use Gitlab when working on-premise and now working remotely for more than 3 years. In both cases, Gitlab enabled a great collaboration setup for my team. We used the open-source version installed locally at the time and now I'm using their own SaaS version. Both work seamlessly.
When using the open-source version, it prevented us to have a very expensive Github account to hold all of our repositories. Gitlab also helped us to not have a dedicated tool for review (like Gerrit) because we were able to rely entirely on their CI + Pull Request management infrastructure.

Using Gitlab

3 - They are all developers. We use Gitlab as a way to sync our code and review each others' work.
1 - Currently, it's a one-man's work. We are using the SaaS version of Gitlab. The free version is enough for our usage. It's current my role to make sure everything works as expected and buy the paid version if something else is needed. In general, there's not much to do, it just works. All the work we have to do is to improve our own process.
  • Code sharing
  • Easy review via Merge Requests
  • Easy CI to test our code on every change request
  • We use the CI to check our HTTPS certificate. On every build, we check DNSimple and upload the certificate to Heroku. It guarantees we always have the HTTPs certificate updated
  • We have the whole boad of directors on Gitlab so they can create issues and interact with developers there
  • All of our product tracking is done via Gitlab boards.
  • We want to use Gitlab CI to deploy a new app every time we create a new merge request so people can validate the app before merging
Gitlab is the best in its segment. They have a free version, they have open-source software, they provide a good service with their SaaS product, they are a fully-remote company since the beginning (which means they are fully distributed and have forward-thinking IMO). I would certainly recommend them to everyone.

Evaluating Gitlab and Competitors

Yes - Long ago, when I first used Gitlab, we changed from Gitorious. Gitlab was still new, but way better than its competitor. Github was not an option for us at the time because it was too expensive. Gitlab proved to be a good choice with time.
  • Price
  • Product Features
Github was too expensive and we wanted to deploy something in our infrastructure. The open-source version of Gitlab was exactly what we wanted. It had less features but became feature-complete for us quickly.
I wouldn't change anything. We evaluated other competitors and Gitlab was clearly the winner.

Gitlab Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Support understands my problem
Quick Initial Response
Difficult to get immediate help
No - We were using the open-source version, but even when using the free version, I didn't need support. When I faced a problem, I provided a Merge Request to the community version or opened an issue to the code directly. Their response was usually very good.
Yes - Yes, I did via Gitlab issues. The development team was very responsive. I was able to fix the problem myself and provide the code for the open-source version, which was promptly accepted.
I found a problem after installing a new version. I was able to reproduce myself and fixed in my local environment. I proposed a change via Merge Request and their response came in a few hours asking for more tests. I implemented them and my change was accepted some minutes after my push. The experience was great.

Using Gitlab

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Requires technical support
Lots to learn
  • CI configuration via yaml file is great. You can just use a default and do your changes via version control
  • I like the way their Merge Requests work. They had many features implemented before Github.
  • If you use the open-source version, you have to do the updates yourself. They have a good changelog, but it's up to you to manage the whole infrastructure. It's not a problem with Gitlab itself, but it takes time to get used to it.
Yes - I don't use it very much but their website is responsive. It seems to work well.
I like it a lot. To me, it feels very simple than other systems I used in the past. Version control is not something easy and they make it simple and easy to use. The whole experience their platform provides is just great.

Comments

More Reviews of GitLab