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 15.0% 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 85 GitLab reviews

5,016 Views
4,048 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 93 Jenkins reviews

3,625 Views
2,329 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

GitLab

Jenkins

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

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

Download the complete report

Helped 859,687 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

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Security Tools (10th), Release Automation (2nd), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (7th), Rapid Application Development Software (11th), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (5th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (2nd), Fuzz Testing Tools (2nd), 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 July 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GitLab is 15.0%, down from 18.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 10.5%, down from 12.7% 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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"If you want to maintain your issues in GitLab and raise your book of work and features, then GitLab is a great tool for collaboration and integration with code deployment and CICD pipelines."

"GitLab's best features are continuous integration and fast deployment."

"The CI/CD pipeline with Helm has significantly improved deployment speed and efficiency."

"GitLab integrates well with other platforms."

"GitLab has better support, and its features are superior compared to Jenkins."

"The important feature is the entire process of versioning source code maintenance and easy deployment. It is a necessity for the CI/CD pipeline."

"The merging feature makes it easy later on for the deployment."

"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."

More GitLab pros

"GitHub linking is pretty good. We have a deployment application where we can run our tests and add various variables to be passed as assertions to those tests. This is pretty fluid with Jenkins."

"It is open source, flexible, scalable, and easy to use. It is easy to maintain for the administrator. It is a continuous integration tool, and its enterprise version is quite mature. It has good integrations and plug-ins. Azure DevOps can also be integrated with Jenkins."

"It's a powerful tool for CI/CD."

"It is very useful for us to be able to collect and manage automatic processing pipelines."

"Jenkins is very easy to use."

"The solution is scalable and concurrent users have access to the platform."

"Jenkins is free and open source."

"The most valuable features of Jenkins are the integration with GitHub, and the automation for deployment."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"You need to have a good knowledge of the product in order to use it."

"GitLab's UI could be improved."

"Perhaps the integration could be better."

"We'd always like to see better pricing on the product."

"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."

"Some of the scripts that we encountered in GitLab were not fully functional and threw up errors."

"GitLab should work on improving their user interface for GitOps as it is lagging behind."

"Even if I say I want some improvement, they will say it is already planned in the first quarter, second quarter, or third quarter. That said, most everything is quite improved already, and they're improving even further still."

More GitLab cons

"The UI must be more user-friendly."

"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."

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

"There is no way for the cloud repositories to trigger Jenkins."

"I sometimes face a bottleneck when installing the plugins on an offline machine. Mapping the dependencies and then installing the correct sequence of dependencies is a nightmare, and it took me two days to do it."

"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."

"It can be improved by including automated mobile reporting integrations."

"There are some difficulties when we need to execute the DB script."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As I work in a vast enterprise, I'm unsure about the licensing cost for GitLab. It's the management team that takes care of that."

"Regarding pricing, I would rate GitLab as moderately priced, maybe around a seven or eight out of ten. It could be more flexible for clients but generally offers good value."

"It seems reasonable. Our IT team manages the licenses."

"The solution is free."

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

"We are using its free version, and we are evaluating its Premium version. Its Ultimate version is very expensive."

"GitLab is an open-source solution."

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

More GitLab pricing and cost advice

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

"Jenkins is an open-source tool."

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

"This is an open-source solution for the basic features. However, if an organization wishes to include specific functionality, outside of the basic package, there are extra costs involved."

"We are using the freeware version of Jenkins."

"It is free."

"It is a cheap solution."

"Jenkins is open source and free."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Build Automation solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

859,687 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Educational Organization

12%

Government

10%

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

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

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs GitLab

Compared 24% of the time

GitHub CoPilot vs GitLab

Compared 16% of the time

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs GitLab

Compared 6% of the time

TeamCity vs GitLab

Compared 5% of the time

OpenText Static Application Security Testing vs GitLab

Compared 2% of the time

More GitLab Competitors

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 17% 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 7% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

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

Free Report: GitLab vs. Jenkins

Find out what your peers are saying about GitLab vs. Jenkins and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

859,687 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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.