GitLab vs Jenkins comparison

GitLab and Jenkins are both solutions in the Build Automation category. GitLab is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.6, while Jenkins is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.1. GitLab holds a 15.4% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 10.5% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of GitLab users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Jenkins users who would recommend it.

GitLab

Read 84 GitLab reviews

5,347 Views
4,325 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 93 Jenkins reviews

3,827 Views
2,496 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

GitLab

Jenkins

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Jenkins and GitLab compete in the CI/CD automation domain. Based on feature richness and value clarity, Jenkins holds the upper hand due to its versatile plugin ecosystem offering extensive customization.

Features: Jenkins is known for its extensive plugin ecosystem, allowing for seamless automation. Its open-source nature and strong community support enable a range of customization through plugins and Groovy scripting. Jenkins excels at continuous integration and deployment, making it vital for managing complex delivery pipelines. GitLab offers robust CI/CD capabilities with seamless tool integration, a user-friendly interface simplifying collaboration and deployments, and comprehensive version control and DevOps features appealing to organizations seeking a unified platform.

Room for Improvement: Jenkins users highlight the need for an updated interface and stability improvements for lesser-used plugins. The installation process requires enhancements to streamline plugin dependencies and expand out-of-the-box features. GitLab, despite its Kubernetes integration, needs better AWS support, enhanced leadership metrics, and reporting features. Users of GitLab's community edition seek improved security and integration with third-party applications.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Jenkins is primarily used for on-premises installations, heavily relying on its large open-source user base for community support. GitLab is community-driven but provides more structured user experiences suitable for hybrid cloud environments along with formal support channels in paid tiers.

Pricing and ROI: Jenkins, being open-source, offers significant cost savings ideal for teams using its extensive plugins without high licensing costs, making it appealing to budget-conscious organizations. GitLab provides free and paid versions, with its Premium and Ultimate tiers offering advanced support and features that are justified by larger enterprises but challenging for smaller teams due to cost concerns.

To learn more, read our detailed GitLab vs. Jenkins Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

GitLab vs. Jenkins

June 2025

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Helped 856,873 peers since 2012

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

GitLab

Ranking in Build Automation

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Security Tools (9th), Release Automation (2nd), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (6th), Rapid Application Development Software (11th), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (5th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (2nd), Fuzz Testing Tools (3rd), DevSecOps (1st)

Jenkins

Ranking in Build Automation

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GitLab is 15.4%, down from 18.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 10.5%, down from 13.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Rohit Kesharwani

Manager, Engineering at 7-Eleven

Improved agility and time to market with CI/CD enhancements

The CI/CD pipelines in GitLab ( /products/gitlab-reviews ) 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.

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Mahdi Mallaki

Senior Devops Engineer at Rakuten

Has a community of plugin providers but needs improvement in Kubernetes integration

Integrating Jenkins with other tools or solutions has presented some challenges. For instance, when attempting to integrate Jenkins with Kubernetes, I encountered numerous errors, which took several days to resolve. In Jenkins, adding a feature typically involves incorporating the repository feature separately. Jenkins lacks built-in Git repository functionality, necessitating an external Git repository to store Jenkins manifests. In contrast, GitLab offers an integrated Git repository and pipeline runner, streamlining the process. One improvement for Jenkins could be integrating a Git server, simplifying the management of CI/CD pipelines. Currently, with Jenkins, modifying pipeline manifests requires navigating to a separate Git repository. In GitLab, however, manifest changes can be made directly within the repository.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like that it's easy to deploy our services over GitLab. The customer support is also good with a really active community. You have a lot of support that you can get online with your stack. That is probably one of the benefits of using GitLab. It's also really fast."

"The CI/CD process is very efficient."

"The most valuable feature of GitLab is the automatic merging of code."

"GitLab is very well-organized and easy to use. Also, it offers most features that customers need."

"The most valuable feature of GitLab is the ability to upload scripts and make changes when needed and then reupload them. Additionally, the solution is user-friendly."

"We're only using the basic features of GitLab and haven't used any advanced features. The solution works fine, so that's what we like about GitLab. We're party using GitHub and GitLab. We have a GitHub server, while we use GitLab locally or only within our team, and it works okay. We don't have any significant problems with the solution. We also found the straightforward setup, stability, and scalability of GitLab valuable."

"We like that we can create branches and then the branches can be reviewed and you can mesh those branches back. You can independently work with your own branch, you don't need to really control the core of other people."

"I like GitLab's security and SAS tools."

More GitLab pros

"I can install Jenkins for integration from multiple developers and automate application delivery, staging, and production environments."

"Has a good interface, is reliable and saves time."

"The automated elements are easy to use and you can put them into your server."

"The most valuable feature of Jenkins is its continuous deployment. We can deploy to multi-cluster and multi-regions in the cloud."

"Jenkins has built good plugins and has a good security platform."

"Very easy to understand for newcomers."

"Configuration management: It is so easy to configure a Jenkins instance. Migrate configuration to a new environment just by copying XML files and setting up new nodes."

"I like the business logs. It's a very useful tool. Client-server communication is also very fast."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"The pricing model of GitLab is an issue for me."

"The pricing has been substantially increased, which is a major concern."

"We are having a few problems integrating with Jira at the moment, which is something that our IT department is investigating."

"I would like to see static analysis also embedded in GitLab. That would also help us. If there's something that it does internally by GitLab and then that is already tied up with your pipeline and then it can tell you that you're coding is good or your code is not great. Based on that, it would pass or fail. That should be streamlined. I would think that would help to a greater extent, in terms of having one solution rather than depending on multiple vendors."

"It would be really good if they integrated more features in application security."

"As a partner, sometimes it's difficult to get support. They have a really complicated procedure for their support."

"The solution could improve by providing more integration into the CI/CD pipeline, an autocomplete search tool, and more supporting documentation."

"I used Spring Cloud config and to connect that to GitLab was so hard."

More GitLab cons

"Jenkins could improve by adding the ability to edit test automation and make time planning better because it is difficult. It should be easier to do."

"Jenkins can sometimes run slow, especially when restarting after a plugin installation or when returning from a pipeline view to the dashboard."

"The onboarding of Jenkins should be smoother, and it should have more pipelines available as it's deployed on many different servers."

"Jenkins takes a long time to create archive files."

"Performance-wise. This needs to be improved. Not only performance-wise, some functionality or some features can be added to Jenkins."

"Jenkins could have better cloud functionality. Currently, we are using the existing legacy model, but we are moving toward the cloud, so it would be great if they could improve in that area. In the future, I would like more cloud features and related training materials, like a video tutorial."

"Improvement-wise, I would want the solution's user interface to be changed for the better. In short, the solution can be made more user-friendly."

"It would be better if there were an option to remove its Java dependency. This would make it more compatible with other software, and it could be much better. At present, we have to depend on Java whenever we want to deploy agents."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price is fine. It is on the cheaper side and not expensive. You have to pay additionally for GitLab CI/CD minutes. Initially, we used the free version. When we ran out of GitLab minutes, we migrated to the paid version."

"My company uses the free version of GitLab, which is GitLab Community Edition. There is a licensed version also available for GitLab."

"The initial setup cost is excellent and you can add the premium features later."

"The solution's standard license is paid annually. They have changed the pricing model and it used to be better. There is a free version available."

"We are using the free version of GitLab."

"The solution is based on a licensing model that includes technical support and is paid annually."

"GitLab is an open-source solution."

"The price of GitLab could be better, it is expensive."

More GitLab pricing and cost advice

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

"The solution is one of the lowest costs compared to competitors."

"Jenkins is open source."

"The tool is open-source."

"We use the tool's open-source version which is free. There is an enterprise version which is expensive but comes with better support."

"Jenkins is a free open-source server."

"Jenkins is open-source, so it is free."

"I used the free OSS version all the time. It was enough for all my needs."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user184734

Systems Administrator at Facebook

Jan 22, 2015

I generally find TeamCity a lot more intuitive than Jenkins.

Moving to TeamCity from Jenkins At work, we’re slowly migrating from Jenkins to TeamCity in the hope of ending some of our recurring problems with continuous integration. My use of Jenkins prior to this job has been almost strictly on a personal basis, although I pretty much only use Travis…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

16%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with GitLab?

One significant feature we lack is the configuration that enforces code reviews, which simplifies the development life cycle. Unfortunately, this is available only at a higher license level than we...

See all answers

How does Tekton compare with Jenkins?

When you are evaluating tools for automating your own GitOps-based CI/CD workflow, it is important to keep your requirements and use cases in mind. Tekton deployment is complex and it is not very e...

See all answers

What do you like most about Jenkins?

Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jenkins?

Jenkins is used in many companies to save money, especially within R&D divisions, by avoiding the expenses of proprietary tools.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 24% of the time

GitHub CoPilot vs GitLab

Compared 15% of the time

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs GitLab

Compared 7% of the time

Tekton vs GitLab

Compared 5% of the time

Fortify Static Code Analyzer vs GitLab

Compared 2% of the time

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Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 16% of the time

Bazel vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

Tekton vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

Bamboo vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

JFrog Pipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

GitLab

June 2025

Download GitLab product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

June 2025

Download Jenkins product report

Also Known As

Fuzzit

No data available

Overview

GitLab is a complete DevOps platform that enables teams to collaborate and deliver software faster.

It provides a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle, from planning and development to testing, deployment, and monitoring.

With GitLab, teams can streamline their workflows, automate processes, and improve productivity.

GitLab

Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron.

Jenkins

Sample Customers

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

Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox

Buyer's Guide

GitLab vs. Jenkins

June 2025

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