Gitlab - it's like GitHub but pretty much just as good!

Item: GitLab
Rating: 8
Author: Richard Rout

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Gitlab is being used by our development team (whole organization) as our git source control provider and our build system, CI and CD provider. We use it for managing and reviewing pull requests and configuring our deployments for each project. It saves us from having to use multiple systems and is much easier as a built-in solution.

Pros and Cons

Gitlab hosts your code and provides build servers all in one solution.
Pull requests and code reviews are all easy within Gitlab.
A viable alternative to using GitHub.
They keep adding features all the time.

Not as good as GitHub in some areas.
UI isn't as pretty or friendly as its competitors.
Has a lot of room for growth.
Is lacking some enterprise-level features.

Return on Investment

CI/CD has been a breeze to set up and maintain.
Source control - obviously a key aspect in any development team.
Boosts productivity.

Alternatives Considered

GitHub and Bitbucket

Gitlab is a pretty big competitor to GitHub; they both provide an awesome set of features and are reliable services. We selected Gitlab because it wasn't owned by Microsoft and it seemed like it was better for private projects. Pricing is good and the level of service for what you get is very comparable.

Other Software Used

GitHub, Bitbucket

Likelihood to Recommend

Gitlab is well suited if you're looking for a cheap git source control provider with decently priced CI. However, it does lock you into using their build machines - in contrast, GitHub plays a bit nicer with external build services like CircleCI and Travis. However, Gitlab provides a fairly decent set of features; it is catching up to GitHub in a variety of ways.

Code Management

Like any other git/source control service, Gitlab has collaborative code review tools that help communicate requested changes and comments to pull requests. It's feature set is comparable to Github. It's probably not as full featured as Github as a comparison, but it does what it needs and provides enough tools for any development team to collaborate using it.

Workload Coordination

Gitlab has enabled us to make full use of continuous integration and continuous delivery with their pipelines and shared runners. We were able to set up automated tests to run on pull requests and require practically anything through configuration.
We were also able to setup code reviews to require a set of rules or checks before being approved.

Tool Consolidation

Because gitlab has a built in continuous integration runner and machines available which will compile, run tests, run code and even perform deployments and other tasks, we don't need to make use of another tool for that.
Compared to Github, it has a lot of these features built in - however Github integrates with a lot of these tools fairly seamlessly also. Gitlab, in comparison, has less tools available.