The seminal package if you want both software versioning and project planning

Item: GitLab
Rating: 9
Author: Dylan Eikelenboom

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

GitLab is the premier software versioning system. However, it has grown in the last couple of years to be much more than that. Everything related to tracking issues to closure, planning, troubleshooting, Kanban boards, roadmaps has recieved multiple great iterations to the point where we use it for much more than just storing the source code we make.

Pros and Cons

It uses the well-known Git language to communicate with, which is very popular
The interface is slick and easy to get used to
They are very transparant in their security issues
Updating the software from the command line is the easiest I have come across

Despite having a good UI, they regularly tweak it, meaning you might have trouble finding a particular feature after an update
The higher tier plans are abit too pricey in my opinion
It has a learning curve due to the amount of features included

Return on Investment

It helped us integrate more processes in their platform, reducing the amount of additional SaaS-services we previously had
The GitLab environment helps reduce the risk of an adverse effect on our source code (i.e. our IP) due to it's redundancy and security-centric mindset
The automated security testing helps us automatically reach compliance with security standards, and reduce vulnerabilities

Alternatives Considered

GitHub

As mentioned before, GitHub and GitLab are at its core very similar. Both have a primary function as a software versioning system and allow multiple developers to work simultaneously on a project. GitLab, in my opinion, excells above the others due to its branching out into other parts of project development.

Security

GitLab's integrated security suite helped us identify vulnerabilities we weren't aware of. It's real strength is integrating it into your merge process, making sure that the security analysis always runs on any new code.

Continuous Integration

We generally use multiple continuous integration (CI) pipelines for each project we have. We have pipelines running and reporting on our unit tests, on our code coverage, building our (Docker) containers or even automatically deploying the new software. It all helps immensely maintaining and proving compliance with our coding/security standards, while for the developers it mainly improves their efficiency.

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

Icinga, Logz.io, InfluxDB, Google Drive, Eset Endpoint Antivirus

Likelihood to Recommend

GitLab is great for in-house software versioning. It has the ability to make private or public reposities, and has pretty much all the features you also see with GitHub. The main draw is the inclusion of all the extra features. There are multiple plans that include a subset of the feature list, which much be paid on a monthly basis depending on the amount of users you have. These features include everything from project planning, roadmaps, Kanban boards, to integrated security testing of your code on commit.