Great! But maybe GitHub is better?
May 27, 2021

Great! But maybe GitHub is better?

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with GitLab

It's used company wide and it is our go to for all things CI/CD. We build all our projects using GitLab and use it as part of our automated testing processes also. In addition, pipelines are also used for deployment onto our cloud environments like Google Cloud Platform via Terraform.
  • Scalable build slaves (called runners).
  • Fast to start pipelines (coming from GoCD).
  • Visual pipeline mapping.
  • Upstream and downstream interactivity is done within the gitlab-ci.yml only.
  • Sensitive variables are "hidden" but not really if you are part of the access group.
  • Environment variables cannot be self populated when running a new pipeline.
  • Faster overall builds.
  • Quite different to GitHub (coming from) so a slight learning curve.
  • GitLab was chosen for the auto dev ops feature over GitHub, but then GitHub shortly then came out with GitHub Actions.
  • We also moved from GitHub enterprise to GitLab, so cost-wise was cheaper as we didn't have to host GitLab.
  • GoCD was too slow and restrictive for our liking.
We have only recently moved to GitLab so unfortunately still looking at the security side of things.

But at a glance, what I didn't like was the sensitive variables within the pipelines. If you are a company and the same level access has been given to you and others, your sensitive vars via your pipelines can also be viewed by everyone.
Having the code base side by side with the actual pipelines seems like it would bring many pluses, but from my point of view, even if they were separate, you would need to state how you would use the code base anyway. Maybe one positive is that its hosted on the server so comms would be faster.

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of GitLab go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy GitLab again?

Yes

Well suited:
  • Easy to scale when building small systems that quickly become large via adding as many runners as you need.
  • Auto dev ops for those that don't really need to go into too much detail of their build/deployment process.

Less Appropriate:
  • UI not as friendly as say GitHub.