We compared Gitlab and Microsoft Azure DevOps based on our user’s reviews in four categories. After reviewing the collected data. you can find our conclusion below:
Comparison Results - GitLab vs Azure DevOps:
All other things being equal, Microsoft Azure Devops seems to be a better choice, given that it has better support and is less expensive than Gitlab.
"GitLab's best features are maintenance, branch integration, and development infrastructure."
"GitLab offers a good interface for doing code reviews between two colleagues."
"This product is always evolving, and they listen to the customers."
"A user friendly solution."
"GitLab integrates well with other platforms."
"GitLab is being used as a repository for our codebase and it is a one stop DevOps tool we use in our team."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of GitLab is its security."
"It is a well-integrated product in terms of the development lifecycle."
"DevOps is easy to use because we can arrange each task in a project and follow up with the testing, development, and business teams. We manage everything through this."
"Typically the sprints themselves and managing the tasks have essentially eliminated our need for reporting."
"Setting up Azure DevOps was straightforward. It's easy to use the default templates. Everything is under our control, so it's simple to implement new requirements."
"Microsoft Azure DevOps integrates well with other components, such as Synapse, which is a data warehouse tool of Azure. It is a framework platform for BI and integrated with other tools, such as Power BI."
"I found the Kanban board to be the most useful for my needs."
"Provides agile management of projects."
"It is a cloud-based system. So, it is stable and scalable."
"In the free version, when a merge request is raised, there is no way to enforce certain rules. We can't enforce that this merge request must be reviewed or approved by two or three people in the team before it is pushed to the master branch. That's why we are exploring using some agents."
"The price of GitLab could improve, it is high."
"I would like more Agile features in the Premium version. The Premium version should have all Agile features that exist in the Ultimate version. IBM AOM has a complete Agile implementation, but in GitLab, you only have these features if you buy the Ultimate version. It would be good if we can use these in the Premium version."
"We would like to have easier tutorials. Their tutorials are too technical for a user to understand. They should be more detailed but less technical."
"It would be better if there weren't any outages. There are occasions where we usually see a lot of outages using GitLab. It happens at least once a week or something like that. Whatever pipelines you're running, to check the logs, you need to have a different set of tools like Argus or something like that. If you have pipelines running on GitLab, you need a separate service deployed to view the logs, which is kind of a pain. If the logs can be used conveniently on GitLab, that would be definitely helpful. I'm not talking about the CI/CD pipelines but the back-end services and microservices deployed over GitLab. To view the logs for those microservices, you need to have separate log viewers, which is kind of a pain."
"We'd like to see better integration with the Atlassian ecosystem."
"It would be really good if they integrated more features in application security."
"It can be free for commercial use."
"We are currently in the process of moving all of our on-prem to the cloud platform. We are trying to make that move and host the majority of our DevOps services in the cloud because the cloud is where most of the things are going nowadays. However, the process of this transfer is not straightforward, and it could be a lot easier. Microsoft hasn't provided the maturity for migration tools. It could be a lot easier in that respect. I want to see them continue to advance the API capabilities. They could add some more robust functionality to the administrative layer within ADO services. There are a lot of configuration elements that you need to take care of at the organization level and the project configuration level from an administrative capacity. When you're dealing with process templates and things of that nature, you have to do them all manually. Being able to automate some of that using scripts or API functionality would be really nice."
"The price could be lowered. It would be nice if it was cheaper."
"Microsoft Azure DevOps could improve by providing better integration with other tools. It is very easy to integrate with Azure, but when you need to integrate with other solutions, such as Amazon Web Services, is difficult."
"Reporting could be better. We would like to see how many applications are onboarded in DevOps and in which phase they are. We would like to know for how many applications we have done only the repository, but we have not yet done the build pipeline or deploy pipeline. Currently, there is no such report. We have to figure it out ourselves. There is no way to check how many applications are completing their build pipelines, how many applications are completing their deploy pipeline, how many are ready to use, and how many pipelines are working."
"The portfolio is one area where DevOps has room for improvement. Built-in reporting and visualization also could be better. We're using Power BI and Tableau to compile more complex reports and dashboards. Azure DevOps has some out-of-the-box reporting capabilities, but they're very simple. It's usually okay on the team level, but if you have to run a complex report, it's difficult and insufficient, so we use Power BI as an extension."
"It should be easier to manage Licenses especially because it's in the cloud."
"I want DevOps to have more automated reminders about tasks that don't need management. We don't have reminders, so a project manager must track the tasks. It's not automatic."
"As for improvement, the first one is pricing. For us, luckily because we are partners, it's free. Microsoft gold partners do not have to pay, but if you're not a partner, the product is very expensive."
GitLab is ranked 3rd in Release Automation with 25 reviews while Microsoft Azure DevOps is ranked 1st in Release Automation with 91 reviews. GitLab is rated 8.2, while Microsoft Azure DevOps is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of GitLab writes "A double-sided solution for both DevOps and version management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Azure DevOps writes "Robust functionality, good integration, continually enhanced, and easy to scale". GitLab is most compared with TeamCity, Tekton, Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle, AWS CodePipeline and GoCD, whereas Microsoft Azure DevOps is most compared with Jira, TFS, ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Rally Software. See our GitLab vs. Microsoft Azure DevOps report.
See our list of best Release Automation vendors and best Enterprise Agile Planning Tools vendors.
We monitor all Release 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.
