We performed a comparison between GitHub and GitLab based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Result: Based on the reviews provided by users, GitHub and GitLab both seem to provide comprehensive and practical software development and project management tools. Long-time users find GitLab's customer service and responsiveness less reliable than GitHub's because they haven't had enough time to develop in that direction.
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the version control field."
"I like the CI/CD features."
"The code versioning is excellent, and having a detailed log, including every change made to the code by every developer, is invaluable. It makes it so that if there is a bug or problem in the product channel, we can find exactly where it happened and how to fix it."
"There are no issues. It's simple, easy, and fully compatible from my perspective with Git."
"The most valuable aspects of GitHub are version control and parallel development. I also appreciate the forking part, which allows us to release a specific set of features to the environment."
"GitHub is the best tool for source repositories."
"Even if I'm not in the office, I can access and work on my code from anywhere with my account credentials."
"GitHub is pure or open-source; you can access it anywhere. You can have a lot of collateral information. You can make the changes and do the reviews from one place."
"Everything is easy to configure and easy to work with."
"It scales well."
"The best thing is that as the developers work on separate tasks, all of the code goes there and the other team members don't have to wait on each other to finish."
"The dashboard and interface make it easy to use."
"GitLab's best features are continuous integration and fast deployment."
"The most valuable features of GitLab are the review, patch repo, and plans are in YAML."
"GitLab's best feature is Actions."
"It's a great toolbox where the CI/CD pipeline is the fundamental component, but there are so many other features that you can pull from, which makes it a very powerful tool. My current client is using AWS, and they can, of course, use AWS CodePipeline, but GitLab is much more mature than that, and it also gives you the freedom to decide to go to another platform or have a multi-cloud strategy and things like that. That freedom for me is also very valuable."
"There could be more integration into Azure."
"If you are uploading or cloning a large file, with more than 25 megs, it's pretty slow."
"The stability can be improved."
"The solution could have better support for the Markdown language."
"It would be good if there were training materials for junior developers."
"From the recruiting standpoint, I would like to see email IDs and phone numbers and a brief introduction about their profile."
"I would like to see more security where a plugin was available for us to update in relation to security."
"The project management sector really needs some improvement for GitHub. I don't know if GitHub made sense for me as a project manager."
"I would like configuration of a YML file to be done via UI rather than a code file."
"We have only seen a couple of issues on Gitlab, which we use for building some of the applications."
"As a partner, sometimes it's difficult to get support. They have a really complicated procedure for their support."
"The initial setup was quite challenging because it takes some time to understand how to pull out or push the code."
"It's more related to the supporting layer of features, such as issue management and issue tracking. We tend to always use, for example, Jira next to it. That doesn't mean that GitLab should build something similar to Jira because that will always have its place, but they could grow a bit in those kinds of supporting features. I see some, for example, covering ITSM on a DevOps team level, and that's one of the things that I and my current client would find really helpful. It's understandably not going to be their main focus and their core, and whenever you are with a company that needs a bit more advanced features on that specific topic, you're probably still going to integrate with another tool like Jira Service Management, for example. However, some basic features on things like that could be really helpful."
"It could have more security integrations and the ability to check the vulnerability of the code. I don't think it is a responsibility of Gitlab, but it would be nice to have more options to integrate with."
"I would like to see better integration with project management tools such as Jira."
"I used Spring Cloud config and to connect that to GitLab was so hard."
GitHub is ranked 12th in Application Security Tools with 72 reviews while GitLab is ranked 7th in Application Security Tools with 70 reviews. GitHub is rated 8.6, while GitLab is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of GitHub writes "Beneficial version control and continuous integration, but guides would be helpful". On the other hand, the top reviewer of GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". GitHub is most compared with Snyk, AWS CodeCommit, Bitbucket, Fortify on Demand and Qualys Web Application Scanning, whereas GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Bamboo, SonarQube, AWS CodePipeline and Tekton. See our GitHub vs. GitLab report.
See our list of best Application Security Tools vendors.
We monitor all Application Security Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
