We performed a comparison between Jenkins and Gitlab based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, GitLab comes out ahead of Jenkins. Our reviewers found that installation on Windows is not intuitive and its maintenance can be more demanding.
"The solution makes the CI/CD pipelines easy to execute."
"GitLab is kind of an image of GitHub, so it gives us the flexibility to monitor our changes in the repos."
"The stability is good."
"The most valuable feature of GitLab is its convenience. I am able to trace back most of my changes up to a far distance in time and it helps me to analyze and see the older version of the code."
"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."
"GitLab is very well-organized and easy to use. Also, it offers most features that customers need."
"Key features allow creation of well-presented Wiki that includes ideas, development, and domains."
"The user interface is really good so that helps with huge teams who need to collaborate."
"The most valuable features of Jenkins are the integration with GitHub, and the automation for deployment."
"Jenkins has a lot of built-in packages and tools."
"Jenkins's open-based framework is very valuable."
"We significantly reduced build times of large projects (more than 80k lines of Scala code) using build time on Jenkins as a time sample. It reduced the developer write-test-commit cycle time, and increased productivity."
"We used it for all continuous integration parts, like automation testing, deployment, etc."
"Jenkins has excellent task planning features."
"The deployment of traditional Jenkins is easy."
"The solution is scalable and concurrent users have access to the platform."
"I would like to see better integration with project management tools such as Jira."
"We'd like to see better integration with the Atlassian ecosystem."
"There was a problem with the build environment when we were looking at developing iOS applications. iOS build require Mac machines and there are no Mac machines provided by GitLab in their cloud. So to build for mobile iOS application, we needed to use our own Mac machine within our own infrastructure. If GitLab were to provide a feature such that an iOS application could also be built through GitLab directly, that would be great."
"I don't really like the new Kubernetes integration because it is pretty focused on the on-premise environment, but we're in a hybrid environment."
"The only thing our company is really waiting on in terms of features is the development of metrics."
"For as long as I have used GitLab, I haven't encountered any major limitations. However, I think that perhaps the search functionality could be better."
"Perhaps the integration could be better."
"When deploying the solution on cloud and the CI/CD pipeline, we have to define the steps and it becomes confusing."
"The product should provide more visualization as to how many pipelines are performing and how many builds are happening. It should also integrate with Kubernetes and OpenShift."
"Performance-wise. This needs to be improved. Not only performance-wise, some functionality or some features can be added to Jenkins."
"Tasks such as deployment, cloning, database switchover, and all other database missions and tasks are being done through Jenkins. If a job does not go through, at times the error message does not clearly indicate what caused the failure. I have to escalate it to the Jenkins DevOps team just to see what caused the failure. If the error message is clear, then I wouldn't have to escalate the issue to different teams."
"I would like to see even more integrations included in the next release."
"The upgrades need improvement."
"The learning curve is quite steep at the moment."
"The documentation on plugin development could be better: more examples. "
"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of an Artifactory (Universal artifact repository manager)."
GitLab is ranked 1st in Build Automation with 70 reviews while Jenkins is ranked 2nd in Build Automation with 83 reviews. GitLab is rated 8.6, while Jenkins is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Jenkins writes "A highly-scalable and stable solution that reduces deployment time and produces a significant return on investment". GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Bamboo, SonarQube, AWS CodePipeline and GitHub CoPilot, whereas Jenkins is most compared with Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline, IBM Rational Build Forge, Tekton and Harness. See our GitLab vs. Jenkins report.
See our list of best Build Automation vendors.
We monitor all Build Automation 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.
