GitLab is a good self hosted option

Item: GitLab
Rating: 6
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with GitLab

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used GitLab to manage all the code in our projects. As a source control service, it kept a history of all our progress, allowing us to see changes, retrieve old code, and roll back changes. We also used it for collaboration, allowing team members to review code before it was merged and deployed.

Pros and Cons

Pros

source control
code reviews
collaboration
deployments
code history

Cons

better design
AI integration
not as commonly used as GitHub

Return on Investment

allowed peer code reviews to avoid mistakes
complete history, allowing us to see and retrieve old code
source of our code deployments
security in the knowledge that our code was self-hosted and not accessible to parent companies

Alternatives Considered

GitHub, Atlassian Bitbucket and Beanstalk

I liked GitLab better than Beanstalk. GitLab had a free option, which Beanstalk did not at the time. From what I have used of Bitbucket, I probably like it better than GitLab, specifically I like the design better. Doing things in Bitbucket seemed a bit slower to me though. Now that GitHub has better free options, it is probably my top choice. GitHub is now the industry standard, and, in my opinion, has the best design of all the options. The biggest reason for choosing GitLab though would be self-hosting and for keeping your code outside the Microsoft ecosystem.

Security

I do not have much experience with GitLab's paid plans or security features, other than the security features that are a part of git itself. I can say that because we self-hosted our GitLab instance, we were easily able to put the server behind our company VPN for extra security.

Continuous Integration

Collaboration with shared code is one of the biggest reasons to use git and something like GitLab. Doing code reviews for merge requests allowed us to double check work to avoid mistakes. And if a mistake was made, having the code history allowed us to quickly find the solution to the fix.

Key Insights

Do you think GitLab delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy GitLab again?

Yes

Other Software Used

GitHub, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Discord

Likelihood to Recommend

The primary reason we used GitLab was because it could be self-hosted, allowing us to have full control of the source control environment and complete control of who could access the code. The downside to self-hosting though is that you are responsible for keeping it updated, and our instance was consistently behind on updates. GitLab is also a good alternative if you do not want your code to be under the control of Microsoft, and potentially their AI.

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