We performed a comparison between Gitlab and Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle comes out ahead of GitLab. Although both products have valuable features and can be estimated as high-end solutions, our reviewers found that GitLab’s price is higher and has uncertain long-term support.
"It is very useful for reviews. We are using branch merging operations and full reset operations. It is also very useful for merging our code and tracking another branch. The graph diagrams of Git are very useful. Its interface is straightforward and not too complex for us."
"The tool helps to integrate CI/CD pipeline deployments. It is very easy to learn. Its security model is good."
"The most valuable features of GitLab are ease of use and highly intuitive UI and performance."
"The most valuable feature of GitLab is the automatic merging of code."
"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."
"Everything is easy to configure and easy to work with."
"The most valuable feature of GitLab is its security."
"The most important features of GitLab for us are issue management and all the CI/CD tools. Another aspect that I love about GitLab is the UI."
"The report part is quite easy to read. The report part is very important to us because that is how we communicate to our security officer and the security committee. Therefore, we need to have a complete report that we can generate and pass onto them for review."
"It was very easy to integrate into our build pipeline, with Jenkins and Nexus Repository as the central product."
"The integrations into developer tooling are quite nice. I have the integration for Eclipse and for Visual Studio. Colleagues are using the Javascript IDE from JetBrains called WebStorm and there is an integration for that from Nexus Lifecycle. I have not heard about anything that is not working. It's also quite easy to integrate it. You just need to set up a project or an app and then you just make the connection in all the tools you're using."
"What's really nice about that is it shows a graph of all the versions for that particular component, and it marks out the ones that have a vulnerability and the ones that don't have a vulnerability."
"Its engine itself is most valuable in terms of the way it calculates and decides whether a security vulnerability exists or not. That's the most important thing. Its security is also pretty good, and its listing about the severities is also good."
"For us, it's seeing not only the licensing and security vulnerabilities but also seeing the age of the open-sources included within our software. That allows us to take proactive steps to make sure we're updating the software to versions that are regularly maintained and that don't have any vulnerabilities."
"It's online, which means if a change is made to the Nexus database today, or within the hour, my developers will benefit instantly. The security features are discovered continuously. So if Nexus finds out that a library is no longer safe, they just have to flag it and, automatically, my developers will know."
"The IQ server and repo are the most valuable."
"The solution should be more cloud-native and have more cloud-native capabilities and features."
"It can be free for commercial use."
"I would like to have some features to support peer review."
"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."
"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."
"It is a little complex to set up the pipelines within the solution."
"I believe there's room for improvement in the advanced features, particularly in enhancing the pipeline functionalities."
"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."
"They're working on the high-quality data with Conan. For Conan applications, when it was first deployed to Nexus IQ, it would scan one file type for dependencies. We don't use that method in Conan, we use another file type, which is an acceptable method in Conan, and they didn't have support for that other file type. I think they didn't even know about it because they aren't super familiar with Conan yet. I informed them that there's this other file type that they could scan for dependencies, and that's what they added functionality for."
"It's the right kind of tool and going in the right direction, but it really needs to be more code-driven and oriented to be scaled at the developer level."
"As far as the relationship of, and ease of finding the relationships between, libraries and applications across the whole enterprise goes, it still does that. They could make that a little smoother, although right now it's still pretty good."
"One thing that it is lacking, one thing I don't like, is that when you label something or add a status to it, you do it as an overall function, but you can't go back and isolate a library that you want to call out individually and remove a status from it. It's still lacking some functionality-type things for controlling labels and statuses. I'd like to be able to apply it across all of my apps, but then turn it off for one, and I can't do that."
"It would be helpful if it had a more detailed view of what has been quarantined, for people who don't have Lifecycle licenses. Other than that, it's pretty good."
"Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle can improve the functionality. Some functionalities are missing from the UI that could be accessed using the API but they are not available. For example, seeing more than the 100 first reports or, seeing your comments when you process a waiver for a vulnerability or a violation."
"We had some issues, and I think we might still have some issues, where the Sonatype Nexus Repository has integrations with IQ and SonarQube. We're getting some errors on the UI, so we've had Sonatype look into that a little bit."
"One thing that I would like to give feedback on is to scan the binary code. It's very difficult to find. It's under organization and policies where there are action buttons that are not very obvious. I think for people who are using it and are not integrated into it, it is not easy to find the button to load the binary and do the scan. This is if there is no existing, continuous integration process, which I believe most people have, but some users don't have this at the moment. This is the most important function of the Nexus IQ, so I expect it should be right on the dashboard where you can apply your binary and do a quick scan. Right now, it's hidden inside organization and policies. If you select the organization, then you can see in the top corner that there is a manual action which you can approve. There are multiple steps to reach that important function that we need. When we were initially looking at the dashboard, we looked for it and couldn't find it. So, we called our coworker who set up the server and they told us it's not on the dashboard."
GitLab is ranked 6th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 70 reviews while Sonatype Lifecycle is ranked 5th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 42 reviews. GitLab is rated 8.6, while Sonatype Lifecycle is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sonatype Lifecycle writes "Seamless to integrate and identify vulnerabilities and frees up staff time". GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, SonarQube, Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline and Snyk, whereas Sonatype Lifecycle is most compared with SonarQube, Black Duck, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, Checkmarx One and Mend.io. See our GitLab vs. Sonatype Lifecycle report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors and best Application Security Tools vendors.
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