Have your cake: Support open source with gitlab without sacrificing a rich feature set
Updated July 01, 2021
Have your cake: Support open source with gitlab without sacrificing a rich feature set
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Gitlab
Gitlab is used by one portfolio of work within the larger organization, as its backlog/project management tool, revision control, and CI/CD pipeline. There are two main projects for managing the front-facing and mostly static website content of the portfolio, as well as for the source code of its flagship product.
- Continuous integration/build pipelines
- Project Management
- Git workflows, pull requests and review
- Revision control
- In-app editing of project source
- Kanban board views of project could use some improvement
- Better explanations and granularity of user permissions and controls
- Openness is a mandate at the Digital Impact Alliance, Gitlab helps achieve this in all aspects of the work
- The built-in build pipelines, along with in-browser editing of source code make managing the static site extremely easy
- Gitlab nears feature parity with github, making software development workflows fairly easy
As a front-end to revision control workflows, all three products are similar. Bitbucket suffers from the usual problems with Atlassian: it's slow and bloated. GitHub is a viable alternative for these workflows; the choice is entirely dependent on organizational constraints. For project management workflows, Atlassian solves this in the bloated, slow and cumbersome way by integrating with Jira. GitHub doesn't have a particularly robust alternative (although plugins and third party apps exist). When choosing a comprehensive product for these two types of workflows [revision control & project management workflows], Gitlab is the clear winner.
We have used Gitlab's build pipelines for continuous delivery but not continuous integration (we employ Jenkins for that instead). The build pipelines surfaced at gitlab.com do occasionally have faults, but for the most part are incredibly easy to use and add huge gains in efficiency to the delivery of the front-facing website, with good logging for troubleshooting when things go wrong.
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