We performed a comparison between GitHub and GitLab based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Result: Based on the reviews provided by users, GitHub and GitLab both seem to provide comprehensive and practical software development and project management tools. Long-time users find GitLab's customer service and responsiveness less reliable than GitHub's because they haven't had enough time to develop in that direction.
"The features that I have found most valuable are that it can support you for most of the road map and it can automate some tasks which works really well with collaboration with the teams. They are really interested in how they organize the history of the code itself which is good."
"GitHub provides good time reduction and this is what I value the most."
"The solution can scale."
"I have found GitHub stable."
"GitHub's version control is valuable."
"The control is the most valuable feature as developers can work on a single code."
"The learning curve is small."
"The deployment is fast since we just have to run the script, and once it's done, it takes a few minutes."
"The most valuable feature of GitLab is its convenience. I am able to trace back most of my changes up to a far distance in time and it helps me to analyze and see the older version of the code."
"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."
"CI/CD is very good. The version control system is also good. These are the two features that we use."
"Everything is easy to configure and easy to work with."
"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."
"The most valuable features of GitLab are the CI/CD pipeline and code management."
"The scalability is good."
"The solution has an established roadmap that lays out its plans for upgrades over the next two to three years."
"The UI is a little outdated, so that could be improved."
"We would like this solution to have a more user-friendly interface."
"The solution needs some more controls for deleting code."
"Scalability is an area with a shortcoming, because of which it has room for improvement."
"If it had all of the end-to-end integration, then we probably wouldn't have any doubts about what we have installed. However, at this point, we're still trying to figure out how to use it end-to-end."
"I would like a more graphical, user-friendly UI, to avoid writing so much code on cmd."
"The onboarding process could be simplified."
"The product must document the CI/CD process more."
"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."
"GitLab can improve by integrating with more tools, such as servers with Docker."
"The initial setup was quite challenging because it takes some time to understand how to pull out or push the code."
"Perhaps the integration could be better."
"The documentation could be improved to help newcomers better understand things like creating new branches."
"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."
"GitLab's Windows version is yet not available and having this would be an improvement."
"The documentation is confusing."
GitHub is ranked 12th in Application Security Tools with 74 reviews while GitLab is ranked 7th in Application Security Tools with 70 reviews. GitHub is rated 8.6, while GitLab is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of GitHub writes "Beneficial version control and continuous integration, but guides would be helpful". On the other hand, the top reviewer of GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". GitHub is most compared with Snyk, AWS CodeCommit, Fortify on Demand, Bitbucket and SonarQube, whereas GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, SonarQube, Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline and Tekton. See our GitHub vs. GitLab report.
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We monitor all Application Security Tools 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.