FOSSA vs GitLab comparison

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FOSSA Logo
2,958 views|1,824 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
GitLab Logo
2,964 views|2,395 comparisons
98% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between FOSSA and GitLab based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed FOSSA vs. GitLab Report (Updated: May 2024).
772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The scalability is excellent.""Being able to know the licenses of the libraries is most valuable because we sell products, and we need to provide to the customers the licenses that we are using.""I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results.""FOSSA provided us with contextualized, easily actionable intelligence that alerted us to compliance issues. I could tell FOSSA exactly what I cared about and they would tell me when something was out of policy. I don't want to hear from the compliance tool unless I have an issue that I need to deal with. That was what was great about FOSSA is that it was basically "Here's my policy and only send me an alert if there's something without a policy." I thought that it was really good at doing that.""Their CLI tool is very efficient. It does not send your source code over to their servers. It just does fingerprinting. It is also very easy to integrate into software development practices.""I found FOSSA's out-of-the-box policy engine to be accurate and that it was tuned appropriately to the settings that we were looking for. The policy engine is pretty straightforward... I find it to be very straightforward to make small modifications to, but it's very rare that we have to make modifications to it. It's easy to use. It's a four-category system that handles most cases pretty well.""The most valuable feature is definitely the ease and speed of integrating into build pipelines, like a Jenkins pipeline or something along those lines. The ease of a new development team coming on board and integrating FOSSA with a new project, or even an existing project, can be done so quickly that it's invaluable and it's easy to ask the developers to use a tool like this. Those developers greatly value the very quick feedback they get on any licensing or security vulnerability issues.""What I really need from FOSSA, and it does a really good job of this, is to flag me when there are particular open source licenses that cause me or our legal department concern. It points out where a particular issue is, where it comes from, and the chain that brought it in, which is the most important part to me."

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"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.""GitLab is being used as a repository for our codebase and it is a one stop DevOps tool we use in our team.""The merging feature makes it easy later on for the deployment.""Their CI/CD engine is very mature. It's very comprehensive and flexible, and compared to other projects, I believe that GitLab is number one right now from that perspective.""Everything is easy to configure and easy to work with.""CI/CD is valuable for me.""The solution's service delivery model is fantastic.""The solution has an established roadmap that lays out its plans for upgrades over the next two to three years."

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Cons
"I wish there was a way that you could have a more global rollout of it, instead of having to do it in each repository individually. It's possible, that's something that is offered now, or maybe if you were using the CI Jenkins, you'd be able to do that. But with Travis, there wasn't an easy way to do that. At least not that I could find. That was probably the biggest issue.""I would like more customized categories because our company is so big. This is doable for them. They are still in the stages of trying to figure this out since we are one of their biggest companies that they support.""Security scanning is an area for improvement. At this point, our experience is that we're only scanning for license information in components, and we're not scanning for security vulnerability information. We don't have access to that data. We use other tools for that. It would be an improvement for us to use one tool instead of two, so that we just have to go through one process instead of two.""We have seen some inaccuracies or incompleteness with the distribution acknowledgments for an application, so there's certainly some room for improvement there. Another big feature that's missing that should be introduced is snippet matching, meaning, not just matching an entire component, but matching a snippet of code that had been for another project and put in different files that one of our developers may have created.""I would like the FOSSA API to be broader. I would like not to have to interact with the GUI at all, to do the work that I want to do. I would like them to do API-first development, rather than a focus on the GUI.""One thing that can sometimes be difficult with FOSSA is understanding all that it can do. One of the ways that I've been able to unlock some of those more advanced features is through conversations with the absolutely awesome customer success team at FOSSA, but it has been a little bit difficult to find some of that information separately on my own through FAQs and other information channels that FOSSA has. The improvement is less about the product itself and more about empowering FOSSA customers to know and understand how to unlock its full potential.""On the legal and policy sides, there is some room for improvement. I know that our legal team has raised complaints about having to approve the same dependency multiple times, as opposed to having them it across the entire organization.""The technical support has room for improvement."

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"The documentation could be improved to help newcomers better understand things like creating new branches.""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.""It would be really good if they integrated more features in application security.""GitLab's UI could be improved.""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 price of GitLab could improve, it is high.""This solution could be improved by adding modifications such as slack notifications.""It can be free for commercial use."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "FOSSA is not cheap, but their offering is top-notch. It is very much a "you get what you pay for" scenario. Regardless of the price, I highly recommend FOSSA."
  • "Its price is reasonable as compared to the market. It is competitively priced in comparison to other similar solutions on the market. It is also quite affordable in terms of the value that it delivers as compared to its alternative of hiring a team."
  • "FOSSA is a fairly priced product. It is not either cheaper or expensive. The pricing lies somewhere in the middle. The solution is worth the money that we are spending to use it."
  • "The solution's cost is a five out of ten."
  • More FOSSA Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I think that we pay approximately $100 USD per month."
  • "The price is okay."
  • "It seems reasonable. Our IT team manages the licenses."
  • "Its price is fine. It is on the cheaper side and not expensive. You have to pay additionally for GitLab CI/CD minutes. Initially, we used the free version. When we ran out of GitLab minutes, we migrated to the paid version."
  • "It is very expensive. We can't bear it now, and we have to find another solution. We have a yearly subscription in which we can increase the number of licenses, but we have to pay at the end of the year."
  • "I don't mind the price because I use the free version."
  • "We are using its free version, and we are evaluating its Premium version. Its Ultimate version is very expensive."
  • "The price of GitLab could be better, it is expensive."
  • More GitLab Pricing and Cost Advice →

    report
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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results.
    Top Answer:FOSSA is a fairly priced product. It is not either cheaper or expensive. The pricing lies somewhere in the middle. The solution is worth the money that we are spending to use it.
    Top Answer:I want the product to include binary scanning which is missing at the moment. Binary scanning includes code and component matching through dependency management. It also includes the actual scanning… more »
    Top Answer: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.
    Top Answer:For small-scale usage, GitLab offers a free tier. For enterprise pricing, GitLab is more expensive than GitHub, as it's not as widely adopted. GitLab is the preferred choice for many developers… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    2,958
    Comparisons
    1,824
    Reviews
    1
    Average Words per Review
    282
    Rating
    8.0
    Views
    2,964
    Comparisons
    2,395
    Reviews
    50
    Average Words per Review
    406
    Rating
    8.6
    Comparisons
    Black Duck logo
    Compared 52% of the time.
    Snyk logo
    Compared 16% of the time.
    Mend.io logo
    Compared 10% of the time.
    Microsoft Azure DevOps logo
    Compared 50% of the time.
    SonarQube logo
    Compared 5% of the time.
    Bamboo logo
    Compared 5% of the time.
    AWS CodePipeline logo
    Compared 5% of the time.
    Tekton logo
    Compared 4% of the time.
    Also Known As
    Fuzzit
    Learn More
    FOSSA
    Video Not Available
    Overview
    Up to 90% of any piece of software is from open source, creating countless dependencies and areas of risk to manage. FOSSA is the most reliable automated policy engine for legal teams to maintain license compliance, security to fix vulnerabilities, and engineering to improve code quality across the entire software supply chain. As the only developer-native open source management platform, FOSSA fully integrates with your existing CI/CD pipeline to provide complete visibility and context earlier in the software development lifecycle. For the first time, teams can collaboratively shift left and audit, analyze, control, and remediate license issues and vulnerabilities right in their existing workflows.

    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.

    Sample Customers
    AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent
    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
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company45%
    Legal Firm9%
    Comms Service Provider9%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Manufacturing Company25%
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Retailer10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization25%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business45%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise69%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business44%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise47%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise34%
    Large Enterprise51%
    Buyer's Guide
    FOSSA vs. GitLab
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about FOSSA vs. GitLab and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    FOSSA is ranked 9th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 12 reviews while GitLab is ranked 6th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 70 reviews. FOSSA is rated 8.6, while GitLab is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of FOSSA writes "Compatibility with a wide range of dev tools, web and "C-type", enables us to scan across our ecosystem, including legacy software". On the other hand, the top reviewer of GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". FOSSA is most compared with Black Duck, Snyk, Mend.io and Fortify Static Code Analyzer, whereas GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, SonarQube, Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline and Tekton. See our FOSSA vs. GitLab report.

    See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors.

    We monitor all Software Composition Analysis (SCA) 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.