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.

For as long as I have used GitLab, I haven't encountered any major limitations. However, I think that perhaps the search functionality could be better.

The main shortcoming is that with some parts of GitLab, things can get quite complex. Especially in the beginning, the learning curve can be a bit steep and it takes some time to learn how to use the tools. That said, once you understand the mentality of it, it becomes easy.

There is a need to improve or adopt AI into the ecosystem like a co-pilot, which Microsoft has done with GitHub.

We have only seen a couple of times on Gitlab, which we use for building some of the applications. Recently, we have heard that some of the builds were taking a long time or were not scheduled. In such cases, they had to contact the GitLab community or the GitLab organization to address these issues.  

So, there is room for improvement in regard to the issues with build times. 

In future releases, additional features could be added in post-deployment monitoring. Currently, GitLab supports CI/CD up to deployment. Anything that would assist in monitoring deployments, especially in the context of Kubernetes or Docker, would be valuable. It may not be necessary for enterprise-level use, but for midrange organizations, integrating post-deployment monitoring of infrastructures and generating reports could be beneficial.

The problem with Git is that it's a solution for managing your source code history. But with Git, you can edit the history, which is not ideal.

Another issue is the pricing model of GitLab. 

Merge conflicts and repository maintenance could improve. If there is someone new to the system they would not know if there is a conflict.

In a feature release, it would be helpful if there was AI integrated into the system. For example, if there was a CI/CD pipeline available, we could configure them for our purpose without doing the process manually.

GitLab could add a plugin to integrate with Kubernetes stuff.

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.

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.

The solution does not have many built-in functions or variables so scripting is required and that is a drawback. For example, it would be nice to have a button on the interface for setting up environments in meta folders. 

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.

They have had a Kubernetes integration built in, but they recently announced that in Version 16 they're going to strip out the legacy Kubernetes integration, and then introduce a new way of doing the integration. I don't really like the new way because it is pretty focused on the on-premise environment, but we're in a hybrid environment. The integration they're offering is not really a good fit for hybrid infrastructure and I was disappointed with that new feature. 

I work for a government-based institution in the US and government-based institutions are very strict about compliance and security. The new model GitLab is offering implies the connectivity will be initiated from the server side to the clients, meaning from Kubernetes back to GitLab, and that's not going to work in our space. We cannot allow traffic back from the cloud to on-prem, so that's going to be a compliance violation. I understand why they want to implement the feature, maybe it's going to be more solid, but it looks like they aren't taking into consideration hybrid environments and the security and compliance aspects. We will find a workaround, but we're still kind of disappointed. It'll generate a lot of additional work.

One feature that has been requested by our development team is a multi-level review of the pool request. When you maintain code and you've got a lot of contributors, a contributor can submit a change in the form of a pool request. There is a feature called merge request in GitLab for when you have a team of people who are supposed to approve a change, but Atlassian BitBucket has a more complete version of the same feature, which includes a multi-approval mechanism. For instance, if you have three people, you can create a rule for how changes should be approved. Maybe they should be approved by you and me and the third guy is not really important, or it could be approved by only you or me, or all three of us together. BitBucket has that flexibility and there is no such flexibility in GitLab.

We had to write GitLab configuration files, commands and conditions, in a YML format. I would like configuration of a YML file to be done via UI rather than a code file. There should be support for code files, as well, but if there could be a UI for it and a little bit of documentation along with it, that would help.

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'm not sure of the complete capabilities of the tool as I don't use it that much. Perhaps the integration could be better. 

The tool should include a feature that helps to edit the code directly. 

In terms of the solution's interface and features, I am satisfied.

As a partner, sometimes it's difficult to get support. They have a really complicated procedure for their support. Apart from the aforementioned reason, I am very satisfied with the product. It is only after we are registered that we get proper support from GitLab. The registration itself it's quite complicated, and it is mainly because they want to make sure that the users with a license contact the right support team.

Authentication can be a problem when you have an application and you want to configure it with them. I used Spring Cloud config and to connect that to GitLab was so hard. It took hours for me to configure that.

As GitLab is not perfect, what needs improvement in the solution is the Wiki feature of the groups or the repertories because currently, it's not searchable by default. You'll need an indexing service such as Elasticsearch to make it searchable, and that requires too much work, so for me, it's the main feature that should be improved in GitLab.

In the next version of the solution, from the top of my head, the documentation could be improved. Besides the Wiki, it would be good if there's documentation that would be automatically generated based on the code repository. In other words, there should be some tutorials from GitLab for developers in the next release.

The solution should be more cloud-native and have more cloud-native capabilities and features. It should be more GitOps-ready.

Some of the programmers in my company have had complaints about the product.

We do face issues in our company when we run out of disk space. We had to do some low-level system interventions to recover the server from GitLab in our company. It would be good if GitLab implemented some diagnostic features so that the server prevents functioning when it detects insufficient disk space. It is important to prevent cache to avoid running out of disk space. Considering the aforementioned details, making a recovery wasn’t simple.

There is room for improvement in GitLab Agents. 

I would like to see more features focused on GitLab or CICD. I am not sure if  there is a roadmap for GitLab CI/CD Elite.

The solution should again offer an on-premises deployment option. In the past, an on-premises solution was offered that used to sync with the cloud-based solution. We would like that option to return because many industries are interested in offline uploads and pathways. 

The solution should integrate Web 3.0 and provide better system transactions.

I would like to see security increased in the future. A secure environment is very important.

GitLab's UI could be improved. In the next version, the documentation of the migrations steps should be better.

Its security features are very expensive. The Ultimate version is very expensive.

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.

Its price should be improved. It is very expensive.

Based on what I know so far, its integration with Kubernetes is not so good. We have to develop many things to make it work. We have to acquire third-party components to work with Kubernetes. 

From the DevOps perspective, the way we deploy applications is too complicated. It needs to be simplified. It is very development-oriented, and it works very well for DevOps, but when you are at the group level, you want it to be simple and more oriented towards the process. The automation process to deploy is not a very good part of GitLab.

It can be free for commercial use of project management and code integrity features.

The documentation in GitLab could be improved a bit. For example, their RBAC is role-based access, which is fine but not very good. It could also be improved a lot.

GitLab doesn't have AWS integration. It would be better to have integration with other container management environments beyond Kubernetes. It has very good integration with Kubernetes, but it doesn't have good integration with, for example, AWS, ETS, etc.

I've noticed an area for improvement in GitLab, particularly needing to go through many steps to push the code to the repository. Resolving that issue would make the product better.

My team quickly fixed it by writing a small script, then double-clicking or enabling the script to take care of the issue. However, that quick fix was from my team and not the GitLab team, so in the next release, if an automatic deployment feature would be available in GitLab, then that would be good because, in Visual Studio, you can do that with just one click of a button.

When deploying the solution on cloud and the CI/CD pipeline, we have to define the steps and it becomes confusing. The trend is shifting toward CI/CD pipeline automation, so GitLab could provide some features that help with CI/CD automation. 

There could also be integration with different cloud services like GCP, AWS, or Microsoft Azure. A one-click deployment with the CI/CD pipeline of our code would be a good feature.

GitLab could improve the package repository. It does not have support for Conan packages revisions.

Additionally, better support for deploying GitLab in Kubernetes is needed (i.e. more mature helm packages and updated documentation).

GitLab can improve by integrating with more tools, such as servers with Docker.

We'd always like to see better pricing on the product. If they could make the cost lower, that would be ideal for users. 

We do reviews as I also work with some of the leadership teams. Leadership teams generally focus on statistics, metrics, or some sort of dashboard. They would like to have the ability to categorize these things. They would like to have a very high-level view. That would help. Someone who is not really a developer, but a leadership team. They are always interested in statistics or metrics features. That is something I would see imbedded into GitLab. That would help someone who is from the outside take a view and understand how qualitative the code is, because they cannot definitely dive in and look at the code, and they will not be able to understand all the details. At a high level, if they want to see and understand, at least they will have some confidence about how the projects are going on.

There was a problem with the build environment when we were looking at developing iOS applications. iOS build require Mac machines and there are no Mac machines provided by GitLab in their cloud. So to build for mobile iOS application, we needed to use our own Mac machine within our own infrastructure. If GitLab were to provide a feature such that an iOS application could also be built through GitLab directly, that would be great.

We'd like to see better integration with the Atlassian ecosystem. There needs to be better and native integration. That is really useful for us as Atlassian Jira has strong integration with Bitbucket, and Bitbucket is a computation of GitLab.

We would like to generate document pages from the sources. Right now, we can't do that.

The testing could be better in that, for the code quality, now we use an external product and maybe the internal product could be more efficient.

I'm new to GitLab, so I would appreciate more documentation about the code and commands.

The integration could be slightly better.

The interface should be more user-friendly.

While I don't have any specific complaints about GitLab, there are always things that could be better.

Better support, for example, could be provided. The technology could be made simpler to use, it should not be overly complex.

It should be used by a larger number of people. They should raise awareness.

I would like to have some features to support peer review. It would be nice if I can input some comments and share them with the teams. But I am not sure if it is already included in some paid versions.

The solution should expand features to match other tools such as Coverity, Veracode, or SonarQube with its static code analysis tool so third-party integrations are not required.

There can be a lapse of fifteen minutes to a day when updates are pushed. We do receive email notification of upcoming lapses and push progress, so that helps.

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

I would also like to see scanning for some vulnerabilities and allow people to have a one-stop glance at the state of the security application

This solution could be improved by adding modifications such as slack notifications.

GitLab should include more features because, during the pandemic, companies like Google introduced more features. The integration and storage capabilities could be better. This would be very handy for educators and students.

GitLab could improve by having more plugins and better user-friendliness.

The deployment and performance of GitLab could be better. In addition, the solution could be faster.

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 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. 

It is a little complex to set up the pipelines within the solution.

GitLab's Windows version is yet not available and having this would be an improvement. This is compared to Azure Git where Microsoft provides us with the setup of virtual agents which you can download and set up quickly. Your laptop will become an agent which is connected to your cloud environment to execute the job which is triggered from the cloud environment. 

GitLab can improve the integration with third-party applications. It could be made easier. Additionally, having API control from my application could be helpful.

The price of GitLab could improve, it is high.

The solution could improve by having better integration.

We are having a few problems integrating with Jira at the moment, which is something that our IT department is investigating. In general, integrating with third-party tools is easy for some but difficult for others. When I create a new project, I go through all of the settings, and then I can integrate that with other tools. However, with Jira, I have problems.

If we could have GitLab execute some of the system tests then it would be good because as it is now, we have to rely on another tool. Ideally, it would execute a system test, a unit test, and then create a report. It is possible to do it but requires a lot of scripting expertise. 

It should be easily available on their menu, similar to adding tests, configuring the tests you want to execute when you launch a build, so the build would be done then tests would be performed, and the report would be created.

This would allow us to know what went wrong during our systems test. If this aspect was more integrated into their interface, instead of relying on developers to script everything, it would be easier.

I would like to see better integration with third-party software.

I've looked at GitLab's roadmap. The only thing our company is really waiting on in terms of features is the development of metrics. We're looking forward to being able to take advantage of them.

We are currently using Atlasian Bitbucket, Jira and Confluence. Atlassian offers more products than GitLab. GitLab offers source control management, version control and collaboration between developers. Atlassian offers features on top of this as well as more integration points for developers.

The documentation could be improved to help newcomers better understand things like creating new branches. 

The user interface could be more user-friendly. We do most of our operations through the website interface but it could be better.

GitLab would be improved with the addition of templates for deployment on local PCs.

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. 

We would also like to have a desktop app for GitLab which will make things a little more seamless.

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. 

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

I would like to see better integration with project management tools such as Jira. I know that integration does exist for some, but it can be better. In the future, I would like to be able to add what I want.

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.

The reporting could be improved and I'd like to see some testing or other deployment tools and integration with third parties.