GitLab Reviews

We use the solution as a source code manager or version control manager.

In our software development lifecycle, GitLab is used as a component for code repository management. We use GitLab for several projects to handle code repositories. For other software projects, we use Bitbucket, but the use case for both is very similar.

Many global users prefer GitLab for its enhanced pipeline automation for CI/CD features. It stands out among source code managers due to its parent-child pipeline feature. If users want to leverage this feature, they should consider using it. It’s not the only platform with this capability, but GitLab excels in automating many operations and offers integration with other platforms.

The solution supports platforms like Azure, GCP, and AWS. This capability makes it a preferred choice, even though other platforms also offer similar integration features. Additionally, GitLab’s tendency to be independent of ownership by another major company makes it an attractive option for many developers who prefer cloud usage

The tool's UI is good. 

In the next release, I would like to see GitLab expand its integration capabilities to include platforms like DigitalOcean, which developers widely use for cloud infrastructure. Enhancing CI/CD automation features specifically tailored for DigitalOcean would be beneficial. 

I have been working with the product for more than six months. 

The solution is stable. 

The product is scalable. 

The tool's technical support is great. 

The solution is free. 

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten. 

We create the pipeline and push it to GitLab to initiate the process. The cloud integration is straightforward.

When it comes to GitLab's CI/CD integration, it significantly supports our development process by accelerating deployments. With automated pipelines, we can focus more on development tasks without worrying about manual deployments, ultimately speeding up our development cycle.

In 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. I haven't utilized GitLab's security scanning capabilities yet. 

We plan to integrate tools like Sonicheap for code security. Currently, we use another product for security, focusing on Q4 security points.

We have used GitLab's features selectively for added security. We don't store passwords directly but use a secret manager and tools to sync passwords securely to our deployment environment.

I believe there's room for improvement in the advanced features, particularly in enhancing the pipeline functionalities. Better integration and usability within the pipeline could make a significant difference in user experience. I would suggest considering new features or functions that could streamline workflows further and make using GitLab even more efficient. Having additional functionalities that cater to specific needs could greatly enhance the overall experience with the platform.

I have been working with GitLab for the past 5 years. 

Regarding stability, while I can't rate it on a scale of one to ten, I can say that we've experienced good stability with GitLab, with no downtime or major issues.

I've had support from forums like Stack Overflow when needed. In my experience, GitLab integrates well with third-party tools like SonicWall and Slack without any major issues.

The setup process for GitLab is straightforward and easy to use.

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.

When comparing GitLab to competitors like Bitbucket, I find GitLab to be superior, especially in terms of features and functionality. Bitbucket still has its own strengths and is preferred by some organizations.

Overall, I would rate GitLab around eight or nine out of ten. I highly recommend it to other users for both company purposes and personal projects. GitLab provides a solid starting point for learning and working efficiently, making it a valuable tool for developers.

I use the tool for deployment. 

The tool helps to integrate CI/CD pipeline deployments. It is very easy to learn. Its security model is good. 

GitLab could consider introducing a code-scanning tool. Purchasing such tools from external markets can incur charges, which might not be favorable. Integrating these features into GitLab would streamline the pipeline and make it more convenient for users.

I have been working with the product for six years. 

I haven't encountered any bugs in GitLab. 

In our company, I estimate that around 30 people use GitLab, primarily for branching and repository management.

Our organization decided to use GitLab because it's easy to use, and its user interface is more intuitive than other tools.

The tool's deployment is easy. 

I would recommend using GitLab. It provides a repository and API, allowing you to create deployment pipelines. I rate it a ten out of ten. 

We are using this solution for DevOps adoption primarily.

The best part of the solution is it's a single platform, and this platform can help you do your required management, your source code management, your build management, your test management, artifact management, deployment management, et cetera. If this solution was not there, you'd have to put three or four different products together to do all the activities. With this, we are using one single product, including security. Everything is happening on a single platform. It is lean and easy management with no complexities and no integration issues. This one platform is able to do everything for us.

The solution has an established roadmap that lays out its plans for upgrades over the next two to three years. 

The release schedules are quite clear. Even if I'm expecting some improvement, the improvement release cycles are already there in place. So 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. 

We have been using the solution for a year. 

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We are using an on-premises deployment, and on-prem will always have challenges with scalability. On-premises infrastructure never has elasticity since everything is fixed. If I have 500 servers, I have only 500. I cannot grow them to a thousand in a minute. My storage is going to be limited. 

Our users are not more than 500 users. So for us, the scaling we have fits. 

I myself being a DevOps consultant, have seen deployments for 2000 or even 3000 users also.In that sense, there is an issue of scalability. The infrastructure we have means the solution will be quite scalable for the next three years. 

We have tried out a lot of other products, including Azure DevOps. We have tried a lot of open-source products as well. The major benefit we found in this solution is it's a single platform doing everything. If I go to Azure DevOps, Microsoft would also say it's a single platform, yet it's not a single platform. They have integrated themselves with multiple toolchain vendors, and it's a Microsoft wrapper on the top. When it comes to Microsoft is a resource-hungry solution. You require a lot of resources to run on Microsoft.

The deployment is fairly easy. The people who are doing the deployment should be very clear about the fundamentals, like any adoption, like when you're doing a DevOps adoption and moving towards automation. 

The most important part is you really have to work on education. On the one hand, you have the investment, however, the investment will never show you how to use it. Once the adoption grows in the organization, you'll be able to see the returns and the benefits that are there. 

We are currently in a phase of adoption across the organization. It's going on very well, and deployment is fairly easy. I didn't find much difficulty when doing deployment and getting people to work with it. Anybody who works on DevOps toolchain implementation can even go and implement GitLab also. It's that easy.

We have a new adoption going on and within a year we'll begin to see a return on investment.

GitLab is a paid version, Ultimate GitLab. It has three editions: one is a free edition or a community edition. They have a premium edition, which is a paid version. Then, they have the ultimate edition, which is also a paid edition. 

There are no hidden costs or fees associated with the product. I pay one price and get everything I need. 

We are using GitLab Ultimate.

As a DevOps consultant, I would like to give advice some. From 2008 or 2009, when the global market started adopting DevOps, until the year 2019 or 2020, we always had a problem. If I wanted to have DevOps automation in the organization, we would require four or five tools minimum. Since GitLab in 2020 emerged as a single platform, always advise people who are implementing DevOps to always move towards a single platform. 

The reason is that you save a lot of money on your infrastructure costs. You also save a lot of money on the resources which are required to maintain all infrastructure for a single platform. And if you maintain a single platform, you'll require an optimized resource tool to maintain that.

If you're going to have multiple tools in your infrastructure for DevOps, you require many people to maintain that. In the end, everything boils down to cost. Cost is definitely high if you need to maintain infrastructure with multiple toolchains. So my advice is always, when we talk about agility, to be lean. So when you bring in GitLab, you get a lean infrastructure; you get a simple and non-complex infrastructure. You have minimum compliance issues and minimum regulatory issues. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I'm a product owner. So, I'm not really using the product myself on a day-to-day basis, but I've been managing teams and companies using GitLab for four to five years. Besides that, I've been involved in two or three tool selection experiences where GitLab was one of the candidates, and because of that, I pretty thoroughly investigated GitLab.

It's a great toolbox where the CI/CD pipeline is the fundamental component, but there are so many other features that you can pull from, which makes it a very powerful tool. My current client is using AWS, and they can, of course, use AWS CodePipeline, but GitLab is much more mature than that, and it also gives you the freedom to decide to go to another platform or have a multi-cloud strategy and things like that. That freedom for me is also very valuable.

It's more related to the supporting layer of features, such as issue management and issue tracking. We tend to always use, for example, Jira next to it. That doesn't mean that GitLab should build something similar to Jira because that will always have its place, but they could grow a bit in those kinds of supporting features. I see some, for example, covering ITSM on a DevOps team level, and that's one of the things that I and my current client would find really helpful. It's understandably not going to be their main focus and their core, and whenever you are with a company that needs a bit more advanced features on that specific topic, you're probably still going to integrate with another tool like Jira Service Management, for example. However, some basic features on things like that could be really helpful.

In terms of additional features, nothing comes to mind. One of the potential pitfalls is to keep adding new features and functionalities. They can just improve some of the existing features to make it high-end, top-quality. I don't have any substantial experience with agile planning. I don't know the industries GitLab is in, and I don't know why they make decisions like this, but as a customer, I would rather see them invest in improving the basic agile planning functionalities rather than adding, for example, portfolio planning features. That's because if I'm going to do portfolio planning, I probably will also need a lot of business users. I'm not sure if I want them in GitLab, I'd rather have them in Jira collaborating with me on portfolio planning. That's way better fitted for that type of work.

I don't have a strong opinion on that or much experience with that because, in the two companies, we used a self-hosted instance of GitLab where the user base was pretty small with 40 or 50 users. My current client has 300 users, which still is not huge, and we're using a managed hosted server. Its performance is fine. It is not stunning, but fine. I just don't have an insight on how much effort that costs from the hosting party.

It is a scalable product. For my current client, we're looking at doing exactly that. We have been using the basic features, and we're looking into making more use of the security features and static testing unit. We're in the middle of doing that. I wouldn't be doing that if I wasn't convinced about its scalability.

My current experience is with the hosted instance of GitLab. So, there's a company in between.

Before that, I've been having contact with them in the tool selection phase as well as the implementation phase, and I was very happy and impressed with their knowledge and responsiveness. I would be curious to see how it is if you're three years into using the tool and run into an issue. That's because in the phase of being one of the tools you want to consider for CI/CD, obviously, they're very willing and eager to get you on board, and thus are on top of your support request, but if you're a running customer, with three or four years in, I'm curious how their responsiveness and expertise would be. I don't have that experience.

Based on my experience, I would rate them a four out of five. They were very good. If I have a question or we aren't getting support quite quickly enough, I would still feel free to call the account manager I was in contact with back then.

Positive

I haven't done it myself yet, but I have been working with the teams who have, and I would rate it a four out of five in terms of the ease of setup. It's pretty straightforward. That's also one of the strengths of GitLab. For example, for my current client, setting up a default GitLab runner that suits most of the teams was the biggest challenge, which is a compliment to the setup procedure of GitLab because that was easy enough.

It's always difficult to compare prices fairly because features between competitors always differ pretty strongly. 

There are three tiers. The Premium version of GitLab is a no-brainer. If I look at the difference between Free and Premium, I would always go for Premium. For me, that's a no-brainer. In terms of competitiveness, they're doing a great job with Premium. The step between Premium and Ultimate might need a business case in most companies. You get a lot more features, but there is also a pretty steep difference in price.

I'm not sure if they have some kind of discount. I've been negotiating with them on prices before, and I believe they weren't too happy to give discounts, but list prices are $19 per user, per month for Premium and $99 per user, per month for Ultimate. 

So, the difference between Premium and Ultimate is a bit bigger, and in most companies, you need to build some type of business case. If I look at the security testing features that you get, such as compliance and value streaming portfolio mapping, I'm not sure if a lot of companies are directly looking for that in GitLab. I myself would rather, for example, use Jira for that than GitLab, but still, security and compliance for me would be the biggest benefits of going to Ultimate. My current client is in the financial industry, and business cases are built up rather easily. So, in terms of competitiveness of features, they're doing pretty well.

In the last tool selection I was involved in, the main competitors were GitHub and Atlassian. CircleCI was another one, but it wasn't a strong competitor. We were not sure about CircleCI.

The difference between GitLab and GitHub is minimal. They're pretty similar. The difference between GitHub and Atlassian is a bit bigger because Atlassian has several applications. If you were to set up a CI/CD pipeline, you would need Jira, BitBucket, and then bigger pipelines, or Bamboo as a build too. You would also need a couple of tools for user management. You need to set up a tool stack. Atlassian's flexibility is perfect, but if you were to score that on ease of setup, that's probably going to score worse than GitHub. That's a clear difference for me between Atlassian tooling and GitLab.

For me, CircleCI, Jenkins, CloudBees, Concourse, and Travis are doing the same in a way. There's some overlap, but the target audience is completely different. As a big enterprise, you wouldn't be looking at a tool like that very soon. Those are tools that would fit in a pipeline for a smaller company that really values flexibility and a customizable developer experience. In an enterprise environment, you just want one tool that's easy to set up and easy to manage, and GitLab and GitHub are perfect for that.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. I am very satisfied with it.

I use GitLab to manage repository code sources, scanning code sources, and CI/CD. We have around 100 users.

GitLab helps us integrate with many types of software. You can deploy and integrate source code, various tools, webhooks, etc. 

I like GitLab's security and SAS tools.

GitLab could add a plugin to integrate with Kubernetes stuff.

I have been using GitLab for four years now.

GitLab is stable.

GitLab is scalable. You can deploy it in a Kubernetes cluster or on VMs.

We don't contact support. GitLab has such a huge community that you can easily find a solution in the forums. 

I have used Bitbucket and GitHub for personal use. We adopted GitLab because it's a good enterprise solution.

GitLab is easy to install and takes you less than a day. You download the GitLab package, configure it, and push the repos. If you want to integrate Sonar Cube or Jenkins, you can use webhooks or the Jenkins file.

GitLab has a good ROI because it can accommodate many users, and it increases your DevOps score.

GitLab has three plans: starter, professional, and LTMH. The LTMH is $99 for user permits, but some integrators in Morocco bundle GitLab into a package. It's reasonable, but they could lower the price now that we have a huge community and many users.

I rate GitLab eight out of 10. It's a good solution for DevOps and managing Ripple. It's possibly the most complete DevOps and DevSecOps platform. You can help users to make wonderful stuff with their source code and applications. GitLab supports many types of source code like Python, Ruby, etc. It's great software.

We use the solution for on-premises repository management

CI/CD is valuable for me. The product also has a monitoring feature connected to Grafana. It helps with alerts. We are using the free GitLab Community Edition. It has a lot of great features.

The documentation is confusing. Sometimes, it is incomplete or has incorrect information. I have informed the vendor about it. Some features in the GitLab Community Edition are not available to us.

I have been using the solution for nine months. My organization has been using it for around two years. We are using the latest version of the solution.

I rate the tool’s stability a ten out of ten. We never faced any downtime.

I rate the scalability of GitLab Community Edition a seven or eight out of ten. The product could improve the scalability of GitLab Community Edition. Around 60 people are using the product in our organization.

Their support is good. 

The initial setup is easier for someone who knows Linux and has been working as a system administrator. We need to have experience to deploy the solution. It takes around three to four hours to deploy the solution.

We are using the open-source version, anyone can download it.

I am my company’s GitLab administrator. Many features we need are available in Enterprise Edition. If we say that we do not have enough features in GitLab Community Edition, GitLab might just ask us to upgrade to Enterprise Edition. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

I use GitLab for some of my CyberArk scripting work.

GitLab's scoop is like a lifesaver. It's very crucial for us in our company to use some of those scripts from GitLab, either for health checks or building new connectors is very important for us, and at times, with GitLab, you don't even need to build the connectors.

Some of the scripts that we encountered in GitLab were not fully functional and threw up errors. The aforementioned area of the solution needs improvement.

In the future, I would like to see GitLab providing more oversight over the coding part.

I have been using GitLab for a couple of years. I use the solution's latest version.

It is a stable solution and seems to be a well-tested product with no issues. I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. There are a lot of users on GitLab, so it is a highly scalable product. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

GitLab has only two users, including myself, in our company.

We don't have plans in our company to increase the number of users in future.

The solution's technical support is pretty good. If you go on Stack Overflow platform, you can find technical support there. The product's technical team is knowledgeable, responds quickly, and is customer friendly.

I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of GitLab is pretty simple, with no complications.

The deployment process took less than an hour, which means it can be done in around 45 minutes.

The solution can be deployed on the cloud or on-premises version by installing the EXE file.

Only one junior engineer is required for deployment and maintenance.

The deployment phase can be done by yourself, in-house.

The ROI has been good since we have had no issues so far.

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

I would tell those planning to use the solution to try developing their own scripts in GitLab and then try to download them from the repository there. You build your knowledge while helping others as well.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.