GitLab Reviews

Pros

I like how easy it was to set up and configure. Adding runners (servers that build your code) was intuitive, CI/CD works fine. When you switch from GutHub, you must get used to the naming convention, but this requires only a couple of minutes to get used to.Overall I highly recommend GitLab for anyone who wants to set up such a platform on-premise.

Cons

When you switch from other tools like GitHub you see features that are missing, mainly in CI/CD. You can't update a global variable from a job and must use workarounds. The pricing is a bit high, especially for the Ultimate plan.

Alternatives Considered

GitHub

Reasons for Switching to GitLab

We needed something that we could use on our own servers. We build critical apps for our customers and we must be sure the source code stays at our own servers. GitHub Enterprise was not taken into account because of the price.

Pros

Using Git as a configuration management tool is already common sense (essential), but I think this software is the most used for remote (distributed) development. There are many cases where you install Git on each person's terminal and operate the commands, but if it is team development and you can't use an "external (public Internet) repository", it is better to set up and operate a Git repository with GitLab I think it will be the safest and standard way to use Git.

Cons

I guess there is no choice but to get used to it, but I would like to see more visual changes and expressions (messages) when conflicts occur that are easier to understand for beginners. After all, I'd like to see them develop an interface that makes it easier to understand the concept of Git configuration in the first place.

Alternatives Considered

GitHub

Reasons for Choosing GitLab

With the end of MS-VSS support and the trend of the times, it was necessary to use Git for configuration management, and I was looking for a Git configuration management tool that could be used by groups (and remotely) instead of individuals, so we decided to implement GitLab.

Switched From

Bitbucket

Reasons for Switching to GitLab

I think it is the first candidate for managing the configuration of development assets in internal development (because the use of Git itself is a global standard). There was a feature that changed the display of the file icon for each file extension, and it had the advantage that it was possible to reduce the file selection error. Also, unlike GitHub, it has not been acquired by Microsoft, so I think it is an advantage that it can be used with confidence in terms of security.

Pros

GitLab does well as an all-in-one software development platform.

Cons

If GitLab makes a billing problem, it may refuse to rectify the problem as they did with us.

Pros

I like the clean, nice-looking interface and controls. I how it sets up pipelines, displays status of each deployment and allow me to re-run.

Cons

It would be nice to be able to re-start a pipeline rather than having to create a new one, even a duplicate feature to create the same one again.

Pros

The working style of most of the CI/CD tools are similar in the background. The ones that has better UI and fast responses are making a difference in the market. Gitlab CI, by far has the best UI. The button clicks, flows and placement of the features are very well-designed.

Cons

I cannot say least but I would be happier if Gitlab adds more UI features in CI/CD level.

Alternatives Considered

Circle and Azure DevOps Services

Reasons for Choosing GitLab

We were not satisfied with the CI/CD tool that we were using because of stability problems.

Switched From

Jenkins

Reasons for Switching to GitLab

We just compared the UI/UX experience of all alternative producsts and Gitlab and decided to move forward with it. In technical terms, also Gitlab CI is very satisfying.

Pros

GitLab's collaboration features, such as merge requests and issue boards foster efficient teamwork.
GitLab places a strong emphasis on security and provides tools like role-based access control,
Workflows and issue boards can be customized using the platform.
The CI/CD pipelines at GitLab are strong. The ease of setting up and managing pipelines directly within the repository simplifies the development process.

Cons

Navigating the platform and understanding all its capabilities might require a learning curve for individuals new to the tool.

Pros

It offers an all-in-one platform that includes version control, issue tracking, continuous integration, and more.
It excels at managing Git repositories, allowing for easy branching, merging, and version control.
It has robust access control features, allowing administrators to manage user roles, permissions, and project visibility.

Cons

It is resource-intensive, especially for larger projects or organizations.
It is hard to initially learn the tools and technologies.
The UI/UX is less tempting.

Pros

It has all the necessary features for revision control for projects with a few people on it.

Cons

There is not a great way to teach this to people who are coming in from a CAD system like Catia, Solidworks, or Creo. There is not a great way to teach this to PCB designers that are coming from KiCAD or Altium. It would be great to have a GUI for those that aren't using a traditional codebase.

Pros

Gitlab just works well. No major issues, open source and got all important features.

Cons

The UI is less intuitive than the Github one

Pros

Really useful to host a repository and to build CI/CD project

Cons

Can be a little bit costly for small businesses who want to use GitLab

Pros

The products has plenty of features, as well as supporting all the basic Git operations/merge requests, you are given a wide choice of CI pipelines you can set up from within the project. Need more? Integrations with metrics, error tracking, kubernetes, snippets and more.
I never had any problem so far, it's stable and always up.

Cons

The major issue for me is that these features are advanced, and if you want to use the repository as just that, you find yourself overwhelmed with loads of choices that you don't really need. Therefore, sometimes I find it hard to look for a button which should be the most visible element on the screen. Additionally, I found the arrangement of information in the "merge request" screen a bit counterintuitive compared with similar services.

Pros

This product is excellent and has both enterprise edition and community edition making it very inexpensive to get into and then moving to enterprise once setup and still very inexpensive compared to other options out there. You also can set up a private gitlab server either in docker or bare metal. I cannot rave enough about git lab.

Cons

There's not much to not like about it. It's a very capable system that can be deployed in every type of way imaginable. If I was to nitpick then I would say adding additional users can be a pain without having self registration available.

Alternatives Considered

Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence

Reasons for Switching to GitLab

We utilize them side by side for different tasks. Our atlassian stack is used for more dev purposes as that team is more comfortable with it as opposed to gitlab where our infrastructure team utilizes it.

Pros

GitLab is a great integrated SCM, Issue Management and CI/CD solution which is a pleasure to work with. The tools feel very nicely integrated and cooperate very well. It embodies by default the best practices for code management and is developed by a company which has open source and transparency at its heart, thus reassuring that the product can be trusted, either as a SaaS solution or as a self-hosted solution.

Cons

The SaaS version of the problem has over the year suffered some issues; however these have been decreasing over time and the company has made a hosted experience on par of those of other SaaS solutions. The resource consumption of the product is not to be taken lightly; however for small teams it has a relatively inexpensive monthly server cost.

Pros

Gitlab offers you a secure space to store and manage your git repositories, for personal use and or for your organization's development team. You can easily assign tasks to team members, and track and follow up on them with clearly laid out and categorized Kanban boards.

Cons

Gitlab's UI and UX are quite overwhelming for a first-time user. If you are new to Gitlab and you haven't used a similar platform like Github or Bitbucket before, you will definitely need a little training to fully utilize your Gitlab space. Make sure to get through the entire onboarding tutorial to avoid feeling lost because it's all going to seem very clunky and difficult to find your way at the beginning.

Alternatives Considered

GitHub

Reasons for Choosing GitLab

We did not entirely shift. We work with both Gitlab and Github for different projects within the organization.

Switched From

GitHub

Reasons for Switching to GitLab

We were already working with Github and found that Gitlab was a powerful solution we could add to our stack. We use GitLab for specific projects that are more timebound and we need to move fast on.

Pros

Gitlab gives us sufficient features to support source code management, user administration and Continuous integration for reasonable pricing

Cons

There is really nothing in my mind which I specifically do not like about the GitLab but If there would be room for improvement, We would appreciate more features for CI/CD integration testing.

Alternatives Considered

GitHub

Reasons for Choosing GitLab

We transit after the Github was acquired from Microsoft. We were not sure which path GitHub will takes after the acquisition. the transition to GitLab was super easy and safe solution.

Switched From

GitHub

Reasons for Switching to GitLab

pricing and security features

Pros

GitLab allows users to easily store their code projects and files in a safe and secure environment, allowing easy collaboration amongst users.
You can import repositories from other Git tools (such as GitHub) with ease, GitLab also imports any version history and accompanying branches.
The ability to make certain repositories private is excellent, most similar git systems charge extra for this service.

Cons

The user-interface, though clean and responsive, can be hard to use and master. Especially for new users, training is definitely required.
The integration with interfacing tools is lacking, most systems (such as GitKraken) require a premium license to connect with GitLab.
User management can be complicated, as the user interface isn't particularly clear here, and the different levels of access aren't clearly identified.

Pros

For us, it was crucial to be able to self host an instance to have it totally off grid and Gitlab delivered beautifully

Cons

A bit obscure to setup, and updates can be quite time consuming as we cannot do them as often as would be required by the project

Alternatives Considered

GitHub

Reasons for Choosing GitLab

GIT has a much better workflow for managing branches

Reasons for Switching to GitLab

Self hosting was key

Pros

Gitlab is simply the best version control and project management tool for any organisation, period! It has everything you need in a greatly priced package. It is my go to tool for my personal projects as well as used in every organisation I have worked with. I even tried to host their community version myself which was great. The documentation is well laid out, breaking changes are communicated well. Apart from this, the CI/CD functionality is easy to use, UI easy to navigate, reporting/labelling/tagging features are one of the easiest.

The free plan for individuals or small team covers everything you need.

Cons

None I can think of. I even like the new UI introduced recently.

Alternatives Considered

GitHub and Bitbucket

Reasons for Switching to GitLab

Availability of CI/CD before any other alternatives. Ease of use. Private repositories in free plan. Ease of working with in a team.

Pros

GitLab comes packed with a number of helpful facilities for managing continuous integration/deployment tasks. The option to self-host a GitLab instance is also appreciated.

Cons

Comes with something of a learning curve and can take a while to fully introduce non-technical users to its functionality.

Alternatives Considered

GitHub

Reasons for Choosing GitLab

Need for extended functionality, CI/CD support.

Reasons for Switching to GitLab

CI/CD functionality.

Pros

I use the GitLab Community Edition (CE) and the first thing I love about it is it's Open Source! I am a believer of Open source software! In my company, we host our own instance of GitLab CE and it's been smooth. We use it for source code hosting and for CI/CD. Source code hosting has been great. CI/CD is nice too. GitLab has all the features required by a code hosting software - groups, groups within groups, repos, role based access control for members. Members can also be grouped with names - helpful to create a group for a team and add members to the group and give access to the team/group. It has forking, SSH/HTTPS git repo access, Notification/Watch repo features. It also has lots of integrations. We use slack a lot and we have integrations with slack which GitLab provides, and we have configured it to get notified for different things, starting from commit pushes to pipeline failures. We also use the GitLab pages for hosting the Wiki site for repos. It's pretty neat! The GitLab CI/CD has the concept of runners which run the CI/CD tasks/jobs. Runners have tags, and you can easily use the appropriate tag in the config to run the task in the appropriate runner. We use different runners for different things like, pushing to a Docker registry (requires special permissions), accessing a prod DB/application, running normal tasks (scripts) etc. All in all, it's quite good

Cons

Although GitLab has lots of features. I do have some complaints about it. I hope that newer versions will make my complaints obsolete! Starting with the CI/CD, it's quite good. But it lacks some features and flexibility which we expect in the upcoming versions. Features like one CI/CD pipeline triggering another pipeline (not present in CE, not sure about Enterprise Edition) and things like grouping jobs in a stage. Also, the CI/CD UI is not very good. It has glitches, there's no auto refresh in all the UIs to show the status of a job - if it's successful or if it failed. The job UI also isn't very great, like, if the job names or stage names are big, it becomes tough to read. Also, when the job log is very big, it reloads the page when the job finishes and truncates the output of the job and makes it available for download instead. This can be good or bad, based on the use case. For us, it was mostly not a soothing experience.

Pros

GitLab CI is great. The GitLab CI/CD language allows us to build complex pipelines easily, pipeline's configs are stored in the repository as well, so we can manage everything in one place. GitLab also has built-in Docker registry. We have both our build pipeline and our images hosted on GitLab.
The pricing is also flexible, I recommend it for both startup and large enterprises.

Cons

Explore Projects feature can be better, it would be more useful if we have a filter to select projects by technologies.
Should support templates on the job level, so it can be reused between multiple environments.
Lack of integration: there are not many 3rd party services that integrate with GitLab for now.

Alternatives Considered

GitHub and Bitbucket

Reasons for Choosing GitLab

Better CI/CD

Switched From

Bitbucket

Reasons for Switching to GitLab

Better CI/CD

Pros

GitLab does its best to help you with what you may need in order to promote quality code deployments with tools and resources to become a more collaborative team. With source control and hosting repositories as its primary objective, GitLab extends to its users an extensive suite of tools and controls to ensure only quality code is committed and only by those that is desired. With features like code reviews, pipeline validations, and allowing for integration of automated tests, its hard to imagine low quality or bug infested code to get through to your production or master code branches.

Cons

Honestly, its not easy to pick out cons of such a great tool in your arsenal. Given that so much goes so well once you've integrated everything properly, the only things that come to mind are more of a annoyance rather than an issue and coincidentally, they're all based on the UI or aspects that don't interfere with the workflow or the work itself. One of which is that GitLab does not offer a dark mode of its UI. Given we are developers and spend most of our time looking at computer screen, It would be lovely to be able to darken the UI so that its not so straining to our eyes. Secondly, we have split up our GitLab in to various teams where each of the teams have access to their own folders/repository. Unfortunately, whenever someone from ANY of these sub-repos is given access, opens a new merge request, or is making comments on a merge request, everyone gets an email about it. It can be very frustrating and I'm not really sure if this setting can be changed from a User level but I would really love it if they can.

Pros

GitLab has been a great resource for me as a developer, providing a user-friendly interface and lots of documentation for assistance. I can collaborate with colleagues, keep track of code changes, set up repositories and branches easily, and track issues, bugs, and feature requests, all of which help me stay on top of my projects.

Cons

Although GitLab is a great platform with many powerful features, it can be difficult to use and understand for those without much experience with version control systems. The UI can be confusing, and the language can be overwhelming. Additionally, there have been reports of bugs and other issues which can be disheartening. Ultimately, GitLab may not be the best choice for everyone.

Pros

Gitlab has an extremely robust free tier with tools that go far beyond simple source/version control. We use the Gitlab CI/CD pipeline runner extensively, allowing us to not only use Gitlab for source, but also for our deployment/build pipeline. Gitlab also has the ability to manage Kubernetes clusters from the suite, which is super helpful. We also extensively use the issue board for tracking scrum issues, which includes time estimates. Gitlab used to be most popular for offering free private repos, and it still does, but these other free features make it an absolute home run. We use Gitlab for every project because of how great it's been.

Cons

The pipeline runner can occasionally be a bit buggy sometimes, but nothing critical. For example, if you prematurely stop one pipeline and immediately start another, it can take 10 minutes for the new pipeline to start for some reason. Also, the time tracking on the issue board does not automatically put the sum at the top of the column, which I find annoying - we built a small gitlab api integration to pull that info for us. They have been updating this feature recently, though, so it may be solved soon.

Alternatives Considered

GitHub and Bitbucket

Pros

I liked that it was possible to have GitLab installed on-premise rather than being forced to use the Cloud version, don't get me wrong Cloud services have their place but sometimes you just have to keep things local.The GUI is also something that I find intuitive to use and this helps to ensure that we use it to the best of it's ability in terms of project management.

Cons

It can take some getting used to the workflow that GitLab likes to use if you have not used a tool like this before and I find that the structure of their tutorials is difficult to work with.Maybe I have missed something in their website, but they could improve the learning resources.