1. Home
  2. Version Control Software
  3. GitLab Reviews
  4. User Review of GitLab
The best chemistry of version control happens in Gitlab
August 13, 2019

The best chemistry of version control happens in Gitlab

Kevin Ritchey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Gitlab

We use Gitlab across our entire business, from documentation to code versioning to CI/CD and IaaS. We've used other documentation tools such as Confluence by Atlassian but we keep coming back to Markdown in Gitlab because of the simplicity, exportability, portability, better versioning, better integration - such as with Readthedocs. Our helpdesk team finds Gitlab easy to use. We also use Gitlab for our development teams and operations teams.
  • Markdown.
  • CI/CD integration.
  • User and group management.
  • Branding.
  • Standard Gitlab implementation.
  • Themes.
  • Need to reconfigure too often.
  • Use the same Markdown engine everywhere.
  • Better documentation.
  • Better bug fixes.
  • Better team coordination.
  • Better productivity from our operations and development teams.
The web console management is superior and I would have given Gitlab a 10, but sometimes it is hard to find documentation about a configuration setting in the gitlab.rb configuration file. As we move everything to code that means moving our CVS tools to code as well - and Gitlab to code. The usability of Gitlab from the end user's perspective is superior and the usability from the operations team is very good and getting better but there could be a little improvement in the gitlab.rb config file layout and documentation.
The online documentation is best in breed and sets the example for all other platforms. We find it so useful that we have never once had to reach out to the Gitlab support team for assistance. In fact, because the chef recipe is so well written we have found that most issues are resolved with 'gitlab-ctl reconfigure'.
Gitlab surpasses Bitbucket in all areas except of course the very tight integration Bitbucket has with JIRA and Confluence. Almost everyone uses JIRA at some level or time so Bitbucket has a more natural and tight integration feel. However, there is good JIRA integration with Gitlab and we have found that we're not sacrificing anything to afford ourselves a better experience in every other area when choosing Gitlab over Bitbucket.

Gitlab is as good as GitHub in every area that we use version control. It excels in that we keep everything in-house and tightly monitored. We do not open our Gitlab instances to anonymous users and our public repositories are public only to our teams.
We would whole-heartedly recommend Gitlab for code versioning with teams across different organizations as the management of users and groups is so easy. CI/CD is built-in and batteries included and because the implementation of Gitlab is standard it is easier to use than Bitbucket. If your organization is already in the Cloud Gitlab is one of the easiest solutions to roll out on AWS, DigitalOcean, GCI, Azure, Linode, etc. Even the management of Gitlab itself can be versioned and deployed using CI/CD tools such as Jenkins.