Good product overall, but lacks Github's third-party integrations

Item: GitLab
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use GitLab for all our development teams. Each project has a git repository and we use GitLab CI to deploy our code to Google Cloud. And we also use the issues board for our Kanban workflow. Our team is small (four developers and one designer) and we use the free plan, acquiring extra CI minutes to run our pipelines when needed.

Pros and Cons

Integrated CI
Environment variables management
Git flow

Issues board lacks basic features for product management, like notes support
Integration with other third-party products. Google Cloud and Intercom offer GitHub plugins, but not for GitLab
It's hard to test CI build locally

Return on Investment

Easy-to-use CI was crucial for our automated testing and deployment
Good environment variable management keeps our codes more flexible, stable, and secure
Lack of native integrations increases the effort for simple tasks, like integrating customer support and issues management

Alternatives Considered

GitHub

A few years ago, GitHub didn't offer free private plans or CI tools. Now that those are standard, I have the impression that GitHub has the best package for small teams like ours, especially due to more integrations and community support.

Key Insights

Do you think GitLab delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with GitLab's feature set?

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

Other Software Used

Slack, Figma, Twilio SendGrid, MessageBird, Intercom, Firebase

Likelihood to Recommend

If you don't intend to manage the product using the issues board or don't care about third-party integrations, it's a great product, git works very well, it's fast, CI tools are advanced, and environment variables are easy to use and manage.

Overall, I'd recommend looking into your cloud platform documentation to check how to integrate with your repository if you need. For Google Cloud, I found it easier to integrate with GitHub, for example.