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FOSSA vs GitLab comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

FOSSA
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
GitLab
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
85
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (11th), Build Automation (1st), Release Automation (2nd), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (7th), Rapid Application Development Software (10th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (2nd), Fuzz Testing Tools (2nd), DevSecOps (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of FOSSA is 3.2%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GitLab is 4.1%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
 

Featured Reviews

Hanumanth Ramsetty - PeerSpot reviewer
Proactively mitigate deployment vulnerabilities with seamless dependency tracking
Before using FOSSA, we could only identify issues after deployment in the Cloud Run. Now, with FOSSA, we identify dependency issues or vulnerabilities during the CI phase itself. This proactive approach has eliminated the need to search the internet for solutions, as FOSSA provides updated recommendations automatically. This has made the process more efficient and mitigated risks before deployment.
Rohit Kesharwani - PeerSpot reviewer
Improved agility and time to market with CI/CD enhancements
The CI/CD pipelines in GitLab are highly valuable. Another important feature is the single source of repository, allowing efficient repository management and source code management. GitLab provides manageability by allowing us to manage source code effectively through separate repositories. Additionally, GitLab enables the creation of individual CI/CD pipelines for each repository, making software more agile. By integrating GitLab as a DevOps platform, we have enhanced agility, improved our time to market, and different teams can work collaboratively on various projects.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is its ability to identify all of the components in a build, and then surface the licenses that are associated with it, allowing us to make a decision as to whether or not we allow a team to use the components. That eliminates the risk that comes with running consumer software that contains open source components."
"Their CLI tool is very efficient. It does not send your source code over to their servers. It just does fingerprinting. It is also very easy to integrate into software development practices."
"FOSSA is easy to use and set up, provides relatively accurate results, and doesn't require armies of people to get value from its use."
"FOSSA provided us with contextualized, easily actionable intelligence that alerted us to compliance issues. I could tell FOSSA exactly what I cared about and they would tell me when something was out of policy. I don't want to hear from the compliance tool unless I have an issue that I need to deal with. That was what was great about FOSSA is that it was basically "Here's my policy and only send me an alert if there's something without a policy." I thought that it was really good at doing that."
"The support team has just been amazing, and it helps us to have a great support team from FOSSA. They are there to triage and answer all our questions which come up by using their product."
"The scalability is excellent."
"What I really need from FOSSA, and it does a really good job of this, is to flag me when there are particular open source licenses that cause me or our legal department concern. It points out where a particular issue is, where it comes from, and the chain that brought it in, which is the most important part to me."
"FOSSA suggests solutions for dependency mismatches."
"Everything is easy to configure and easy to work with."
"The CI/CD pipeline with Helm has significantly improved deployment speed and efficiency."
"It is very flexible and easy because you can store data on cloud."
"GitLab's best features are continuous integration and fast deployment."
"The most valuable feature of GitLab is its security."
"The most valuable aspects of GitLab are the ability to create branches, merge branches, and compare branches to resolve code conflicts."
"By integrating GitLab as a DevOps platform, we have enhanced agility, improved our time to market, and different teams can work collaboratively on various projects."
"The solution's most valuable features are pipelines."
 

Cons

"If you have thousands of applications, organizing them all into teams or tags is challenging."
"We have seen some inaccuracies or incompleteness with the distribution acknowledgments for an application, so there's certainly some room for improvement there. Another big feature that's missing that should be introduced is snippet matching, meaning, not just matching an entire component, but matching a snippet of code that had been for another project and put in different files that one of our developers may have created."
"I want the product to include binary scanning which is missing at the moment. Binary scanning includes code and component matching through dependency management. It also includes the actual scanning and reverse engineering of the boundaries and finding out what is inside."
"On the dashboard, there should be an option to increase the column width so that we can see the complete name of the GitHub repository. Currently, on the dashboard, we see the list of projects, but to see the complete name, you have to hover your mouse over an item, which is annoying."
"The solution provides contextualized, actionable, intelligence that alerts us to compliance issues, but there is still a little bit of work to be done on it. One of the issues that I have raised with FOSSA is that when it identifies an issue that is an error, why is it in error? What detail can they give to me? They've improved, but that still needs some work. They could provide more information that helps me to identify the dependencies and then figure out where they originated from."
"I would like the FOSSA API to be broader. I would like not to have to interact with the GUI at all, to do the work that I want to do. I would like them to do API-first development, rather than a focus on the GUI."
"I would like more customized categories because our company is so big. This is doable for them. They are still in the stages of trying to figure this out since we are one of their biggest companies that they support."
"For open-source management, FOSSA's out-of-the-box policy engine is easy to use, but the list of licenses is not as complete as we would like it to be. They should add more open-source licenses to the selection."
"Some of the scripts that we encountered in GitLab were not fully functional and threw up errors."
"We would like to generate document pages from the sources."
"I would like to see security increased in the future. A secure environment is very important."
"GitLab could improve the patch repository. It does not have support for Conan patch version regions. Additionally, better support for Kubernetes deployment is needed as part of the package."
"This solution could be improved by adding modifications such as slack notifications."
"I rate the support from GitLab a four out of five."
"I would like to see better integration with project management tools such as Jira."
"GitLab should work on improving their user interface for GitOps as it is lagging behind."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's cost is a five out of ten."
"FOSSA is not cheap, but their offering is top-notch. It is very much a "you get what you pay for" scenario. Regardless of the price, I highly recommend FOSSA."
"FOSSA is a fairly priced product. It is not either cheaper or expensive. The pricing lies somewhere in the middle. The solution is worth the money that we are spending to use it."
"Its price is reasonable as compared to the market. It is competitively priced in comparison to other similar solutions on the market. It is also quite affordable in terms of the value that it delivers as compared to its alternative of hiring a team."
"The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free."
"GitLab is cheap."
"My company uses the free version of GitLab, which is GitLab Community Edition. There is a licensed version also available for GitLab."
"We are currently using the open-source version."
"In terms of the pricing for GitLab, on a scale of one to five, with one being expensive and five being cheap, I'm rating pricing for the solution a four. It could still be cheaper because right now, my company has a small team, and sometimes it's difficult to use a paid product for a small team. You'd hope the team will grow and scale, but currently, you're paying a high license fee for a small team. I'm referring to the GitLab license that has premium features and will give you all features. This can be a problem for management to approve the high price of the license for a team this small."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the pricing a five out of ten."
"The solution is free."
"We are using the open-source version."
"I don't mind the price because I use the free version."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
22%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Educational Organization
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FOSSA?
The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free. You have to pay for the features you need, which I think is fair. If you want to get value for free...
What needs improvement with FOSSA?
FOSSA does not show the exact line of code with vulnerabilities, which adds time to the process as we have to locate these manually. Some other tools like Check Point or SonarQube provide exact lin...
What is your primary use case for FOSSA?
I have worked with FOSSA primarily to manage the dependencies in our projects. For example, if I take a Spring Boot application, FOSSA helps in identifying mismatches or unsupported dependencies th...
What do you like most about GitLab?
I find the features and version control history to be most valuable for our development workflow. These aspects provide us with a clear view of changes and help us manage requests efficiently.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitLab?
The pricing and cost are on par with other tools and are neither too expensive nor cheap.
What needs improvement with GitLab?
Regarding improvements, making task management is something that GitLab can potentially make easier, similar to what DevOps or Jira does.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Fuzzit
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent
1. NASA  2. IBM  3. Sony  4. Alibaba  5. CERN  6. Siemens  7. Volkswagen  8. ING  9. Ticketmaster  10. SpaceX  11. Adobe  12. Intuit  13. Autodesk  14. Rakuten  15. Unity Technologies  16. Pandora  17. Electronic Arts  18. Nordstrom  19. Verizon  20. Comcast  21. Philips  22. Deutsche Telekom  23. Orange  24. Fujitsu  25. Ericsson  26. Nokia  27. General Electric  28. Cisco  29. Accenture  30. Deloitte  31. PwC  32. KPMG
Find out what your peers are saying about FOSSA vs. GitLab and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.