Share your experience using Plutora

I have been using GitLab since I started my journey in IT because GitLab is important for all software developers, DevOps, and SREs in all fields in IT. I have been using it for a long time.

My main use case for GitLab is source code management combined with CI/CD automation. I use GitLab to host application and infrastructure code, manage branches, and merge requests, and run automated CI/CD pipelines that build, test, and deploy applications across every environment. As an SRE-focused DevOps professional, I primarily use GitLab for end-to-end DevOps workflows from version control to automated CI/CD, triggering pipelines on every commit, running tests and security scans, building Docker images, and deploying to cloud or Kubernetes environments using GitLab Runners. This is how I use it day-to-day.

Using GitLab for this DevOps workflow has significantly improved my efficiency and my team's efficiency by centralizing the entire DevOps workflow, code, CI/CDs, reviews, and deployments in one platform. This reduces tool hopping and makes collaboration much smoother. First, GitLab enables faster and safer deployments. Standardized pipelines and approval-based merge requests ensure consistent deployments across environments, reducing production issues. Secondly, quick issue detection and rollback are facilitated through pipeline failures and job logs, which help identify problems early, and version releases make rollbacks faster and safer. Automation reduces manual work as CI/CD pipelines automatically build, test, scan, and deploy on every commit, saving hours of manual effort and eliminating human errors. The fourth point is infrastructure as code at scale; managing Terraform and Ansible code in GitLab allows repeatable, auditable infrastructure changes with clear history. Finally, improved reliability and confidence arise because automated testing and security scans increase confidence in releases and reduce post-deployment incidents.

Another valuable aspect is better collaboration and visibility, which comes with merge requests, inline reviews, and pipeline status checks, making it easy for the team and me to review changes and catch issues early.

GitLab has had a significant overall positive impact on my organization by standardizing and automating how we build, test, and deploy software. Having code management, CI/CD, security, and collaboration in a single platform improves speed, reliability, and transparency across teams.

The improvements have resulted in faster and more reliable releases. We replaced manual deployments with automated CI/CD pipelines, which have made releases predictable and repeatable, with deployment time reduced from hours to minutes. Another improvement is reduced production incidents; mandatory pipeline tests and approvals before merges and early failure detection through automated checks lead to standardized deployment processes across environments.

Additional improvement comes through shift-left security, where security scanning built directly into pipelines detects vulnerabilities early rather than in production, eliminating the need for separate security tools for basic scanning. Finally, better onboarding and knowledge sharing occur through standardized CI/CD templates and documented pipelines, allowing new team members to become productive faster while reducing dependency on tribal knowledge.

In my view, the best features GitLab offers include integrated CI/CD, which is one of GitLab's strongest capabilities. We define pipelines in a .gitlab-ci.yml file and runners execute them automatically on commits and merge requests. It automates building, testing, and deploying, eliminates manual release steps, and includes quality, security, and compliance stages, while also being easy to scale with GitLab Runners, leading to faster feedback loops, fewer human errors, and consistent deployments.

The second feature I would mention is merge requests, which combine collaboration, review, and automation in one place. This impacts better code quality, cleaner history, and structured team collaboration. The third point is built-in security scanning, as GitLab offers automatic scanning integrated into pipelines including SAST, DAST, and dependency scanning, making security a part of our CI/CD pipeline rather than an afterthought.

Lastly, pipeline visualization and insights help us understand delays or failures with graphical pipeline views, job logs, and metrics such as pipeline duration and failure rates.

A pain point I have encountered with GitLab is that large GitLab-ci.yml files become hard to read and maintain. YAML syntax is strict, and errors are easy to make, while debugging pipeline logic can sometimes take time, leading to slower iteration when the pipeline grows complex. I propose an improvement idea of better visual pipeline editors and stronger validations and linting before a commit.

Regarding runner management and scaling, managing self-hosted runners requires effort and scaling runners during peak usage can be challenging, which leads to pipeline delays during high load. An expected improvement here is smarter auto-scaling by default, along with better runner health visibility and alerts.

Concerning security features, advanced security scans are locked behind paid tiers, limiting coverage for smaller teams unless the budget allows. I suggest introducing more basic security features in the free tier and clearer guidance on prioritizing vulnerabilities.

Another area for improvement is UI performance and navigation. Finding older pipelines or logs or settings sometimes takes extra clicks, leading to small but noticeable productivity loss. An improvement would be a faster UI for large repositories and enhanced global search and filtering.

I started my journey in 2021, and since my first organization, I have been working in my current field as a Site Reliability Engineer for nearly five years.

GitLab is pretty stable in my experience. I have not experienced any downtime or reliability issues so far.

GitLab's scalability is really great, and it handles growth in users, projects, or workloads effectively, helping us in every aspect.

I have not interacted with GitLab's customer support because I have not faced downtime or any significant issues while using GitLab. Therefore, my experience is great since I have not encountered any issues requiring support.

Positive

I have not used any other solution before GitLab, as I started using GitLab right from the beginning of my career in IT.

My experience with GitLab's pricing, setup cost, and licensing is very positive. GitLab follows a tier-based licensing model that includes free, premium, and ultimate options. I have experience with the free tier and later evaluated the paid tiers mainly for advanced security, compliance, and governance features. I found pricing reasonable for the value, especially when compared to buying separate tools for CI/CD, security, and repo management.

I can share concrete ROI metrics and examples that focus on time saved, costs avoided, and risks reduced. For instance, with deployment automation, before GitLab, it took two engineers one to two hours per deployment, but after implementing GitLab CI/CD, it only needs one engineer and takes 10 to 15 minutes, resulting in a 70 to 85% reduction in deployment effort and saving dozens of engineering hours per month. Additionally, we see cost avoidance from reduced production incidents, so automated tests, approvals, and pipelines minimize human error, showing a 30 to 40% reduction in deployment-related incidents, which results in less downtime and fewer after-hours escalations.

After adopting GitLab, I can share some measurable outcomes. Before GitLab, deployment time took one to two hours for manual steps and coordination, and now it is down to 10 to 15 minutes, reflecting a 75 to 85% reduction in deployment time. Regarding release frequency, previously we had one to two releases per week, but now we achieve daily or on-demand releases, resulting in a three to five-fold increase in release frequency. In terms of production incidents, we faced frequent post-deployment issues before GitLab, but we now see a noticeable drop due to automated tests and approvals, with a 30 to 40% reduction in deployment-related incidents.

The setup cost was moderate and not very high. For GitLab SaaS, the initial setup cost was minimal, while self-managed GitLab involved infrastructure, VM storage backups, runner configuration, and integrations, which I also found moderate.

Before choosing GitLab, I did evaluate other options, specifically Bitbucket in combination with Jenkins. We started exploring Bitbucket, but after weighing the pros and cons, I decided to move to GitLab.

I would advise others looking into using GitLab to definitely go for it because it has really good features. Start simple, then scale by not building complex pipelines from day one; instead, begin with basic build, test, and deploy stages, adding security scans, approvals, and optimizations gradually. This keeps pipelines readable and reduces early frustrations.

Use reusable CI/CD templates to create organization-wide pipeline standards, which improves consistency, decreases duplication, and speeds up onboarding. Additionally, invest early in a runner strategy to decide between SaaS runners and self-hosted runners, planning for auto-scaling and isolation to prevent runner bottlenecks. Finally, monitor and optimize pipelines by tracking duration and failure rates, removing slow or flaky jobs to ensure fast feedback that keeps developers engaged and productive.

The reviews I provided are genuinely positive because I find GitLab to be an excellent product for us in IT. Honestly, there are other products in the market that serve as alternatives to GitLab, but I cannot envision working in IT, especially in servers, deployment, or CI/CD, without GitLab. I am a huge fan of GitLab, and my experience working with it has been wonderful; it has greatly aided our teams by reducing human errors and the number of personnel required. My overall review rating for GitLab is 9 out of 10.

GitLab is a major help for DevOps automation, primarily for version controlling and deployment purposes. I use GitLab for DevOps automation and version control in my daily work by creating many branches for each environment through which deployments can be controlled and version control can be maintained. When we need to make a change only for the dev environment, we simply make the code change for the dev branch, and only the servers connected to the dev branch receive those changes applied while the rest remains the same. In a similar way, we can particularly target a group of servers, which prevents other issues from occurring. GitLab helps tremendously in this purpose.

GitLab has role-based access control, so when a team member needs to make a code change, they cannot directly apply it to the environment but must put in a merge request. Once a senior reviews the code and approves it, then it is implemented across the environment, making it safer and allowing everyone to experience the process.

The best features GitLab offers are version control and automation, which are the major things that stand out to me. When it comes to access, the login is very smooth, with just one login integrated with our Okta, allowing everyone to log in easily. Deployments become much easier, and that is how GitLab helps.

The automation features make my work easier because we use a tool called AWX, which is connected to GitLab. Whenever we run a job on AWX, it directly checks the code and uses it. Since the code is not preserved locally but kept in the cloud, it is safe and nobody can tamper with it. When it comes to safety, that is a major thing. Automation features allow the code to be accessed from any tools we use, so the jobs we run are helping tremendously and doing their work perfectly.

For pipeline tasks, we have created a significant amount of pipelines, which are all hosted in GitLab. Running the pipelines has become much easier, and they are doing a perfect job, helping tremendously in our day-to-day activities.

GitLab has positively impacted my organization because previously we stored code locally on servers, leading to many risks. Since GitLab came into our environment, our integration and deployments became much easier, helping our work become much smoother.

Improvements from GitLab have led to better team collaboration because when several people are working, they can all edit the code and submit it as a merge request, and once approved, it reflects directly to the main branch. Many can work at the same time. When it comes to deployments, deploying has become much faster since we started using GitLab, and even if errors occur, we can spot them easily and troubleshoot, which has helped tremendously.

I believe GitLab can be improved by making integration with other platforms a little easier. I understand it is a matter of security, but it would be much more helpful if it could integrate with other tools more seamlessly.

When it comes to speed, if multiple users are committing their codes, it takes a bit longer, which I think can be improved. Fine-tuning resources might help, but apart from that, I have not felt many improvements, as everything is going smoothly.

I have been using GitLab for the last five years.

GitLab has been very scalable in my experience. Even as our count of servers and applications grows, we can still support our needs with GitLab, which is why I find it very scalable.

I have had experiences with GitLab's customer support, and they have been very supportive. I have not faced any issues from their side till today.

Negative

I have not used a different solution before GitLab. From the day I started working in my organization, I have been using GitLab. While I heard they were storing all the codes locally on servers previously, I have not experienced that.

Before choosing GitLab, my organization evaluated other options such as Jira and Atlassian, but the major advantage of GitLab led us to choose it.

I would rate GitLab a 10 on a scale of one to ten because it is perfect in all ways. I choose 10 because the offerings provided by GitLab are very useful in aspects like deployment, team collaboration, and deployment speed, all of which GitLab helps with tremendously.

If you are looking for faster deployment, team collaboration, version control, and better use of CI/CD pipelines, my advice is that GitLab is the best option for you, so go and try it out. I give GitLab an overall rating of 10.