Gitlab is great for both enterprise solutions and personal use

Item: GitLab
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Gitlab both personally and professionally. I have also used it at several organizations. In my current organization, it is being evaluated for rollout as a company wide version control standard.

Pros and Cons

Pipelines: Gitlab Pipelines is an excellent way to get started with pipelines easily and without much overhead. And with it being all encapsulated within Gitlab itself, it makes integrating your code into that pipeline even easier. Just a little bit of code and VOILA. You have at least a minimum viable pipeline.
VCS: Gitlab is, of course, a great version control system.
Usability: Gitlab has really put a significant amount of focus into usability. They've drilled down and ensured that the way companies and individuals need to use the tool, they can.
Groups: Gitlab makes setting permissions on projects extremely easy. Other version control systems make it more difficult to set things granular enough, but gitlab allows you to group things in a granular enough way for your projects.

In some ways, it's more difficult to navigate the web UI than I would like. Could be an overload of options, or could just be the difference of switching between different version control systems.

Alternatives Considered

Bitbucket, Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash) and GitHub

Gitlab's pipeline solution is by far the best when compared to Bitbucket and GitHub. GitHub's "actions" being relatively new. Gitlab is by far superior in overall reliability, extensibility, and functionality when compared to Bitbucket and run's relatively even with GitHub.

Support Rating

At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft.

Other Software Used

Chef, Terraform, Consul, Bitbucket, Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash), GitHub

Likelihood to Recommend

Gitlab is extremely well suited for an enterprise VCS solution. It's also great for personal projects as well. Best part is: it's free up to a certain point which allows you to properly evaluate the solution for your organization.

Code Management

Gitlab makes team collaboration a breeze. Literally a life saver keeping me from having to keep track of all these different tools for artifact storage, pipelines, code management, issue tracking, etc. Doing it all in Gitlab just makes things WORK. It also helps standardize platforms so you do not have teams using 20 different tools to accomplish the same goal.

Workload Coordination

Using Gitlab really drives home remote collaboration. There are so many tools in this space now, but Gitlab really practices what they preach as they are a remote first company. As such, they have thought through what challenges remote and on-prem teams face that are the same, but have made a huge effort to deliver a product that makes sure regardless of locale you're able to work together and collaborate effectively. At the end of the day, that's the important part. From a user experience perspective, Gitlab really nails this 100%.

Tool Consolidation

Gitlab actually reduces the need for quite a bit of tooling. First and foremost, Gitlab as a version control system allows teams to use it as opposed to the multitude of other vcs systems out there. Gitlab has also eliminated the need for having a separate artifact storage (at least for our needs). Finally, gitlab has made issue tracking a breeze which has eliminated the need for Jira (at least within our use case). Jenkins as well -- using Gitlab as our pipeline solution really gets rid of complexity, plugin reliability, and unnecessary configuration outside the code base.

Usability

In some ways, as mentioned before, the web interface can be a little different to get used to. The gitlab documentation is also a little lacking compared to documentation of other tools in the same class.