Great Open Source Software!

The overall experience was good. It's highly recommended for companies who want host their code in their own infra and are ready to maintain the code hosting software itself

Pros

I use the GitLab Community Edition (CE) and the first thing I love about it is it's Open Source! I am a believer of Open source software! In my company, we host our own instance of GitLab CE and it's been smooth. We use it for source code hosting and for CI/CD. Source code hosting has been great. CI/CD is nice too. GitLab has all the features required by a code hosting software - groups, groups within groups, repos, role based access control for members. Members can also be grouped with names - helpful to create a group for a team and add members to the group and give access to the team/group. It has forking, SSH/HTTPS git repo access, Notification/Watch repo features. It also has lots of integrations. We use slack a lot and we have integrations with slack which GitLab provides, and we have configured it to get notified for different things, starting from commit pushes to pipeline failures. We also use the GitLab pages for hosting the Wiki site for repos. It's pretty neat! The GitLab CI/CD has the concept of runners which run the CI/CD tasks/jobs. Runners have tags, and you can easily use the appropriate tag in the config to run the task in the appropriate runner. We use different runners for different things like, pushing to a Docker registry (requires special permissions), accessing a prod DB/application, running normal tasks (scripts) etc. All in all, it's quite good

Cons

Although GitLab has lots of features. I do have some complaints about it. I hope that newer versions will make my complaints obsolete! Starting with the CI/CD, it's quite good. But it lacks some features and flexibility which we expect in the upcoming versions. Features like one CI/CD pipeline triggering another pipeline (not present in CE, not sure about Enterprise Edition) and things like grouping jobs in a stage. Also, the CI/CD UI is not very good. It has glitches, there's no auto refresh in all the UIs to show the status of a job - if it's successful or if it failed. The job UI also isn't very great, like, if the job names or stage names are big, it becomes tough to read. Also, when the job log is very big, it reloads the page when the job finishes and truncates the output of the job and makes it available for download instead. This can be good or bad, based on the use case. For us, it was mostly not a soothing experience.

Great software wit a minimal but efficient design but can definitely use improvements

Best way to use it is to keep your gitlab organized is keeping pr's as functional as possible and not mashing 1000 changes into one pr. otherwise gitlab performance go down and so will the interest of the other people who review your merge request!! Setting up gitlab to manage your software projects is child's play, and although the UI is minimal in design it which gets the job done but could definitely use some enhancements and that would make it a top tier no nonsense go-to-software-management-product. Overall it is a great software. I am not aware of the quality of the customer service on the paid tier so can't comment on that. One can manage and maintain gitlab inhouse without needing any paid support. I would recommend it without reservations to any and all software developing companies.

Pros

1. Free of cost
2. Highly efficient, does the job without uncertainty.
3. Never observed any downtime
4. Very frequent and proper updates to the software.
5. easy to maintain
6. can easily integrate with jenkins for Continuous Integration- Continuous Deployment.
7. Easy to setup and use, no support or setup or external teams required. Anybody with minimum computer skills can get this up and running.
8. easy integration with youtrack for issue tracking and merge requesting tracking

Cons

These are not very big cons, but I find them annoying and could definitely use improvement:
1. The edit description on an open merge request also shows up on the history. So If somebody were to make a 10 different changes to the title while keeping the
2. The code formatting in the description box is not too good. It can take several tries before getting it right.
3. There is no way of searching for something based on a line of text. For example if you were looking for a commit or a merge request but you only remember the
4. sometimes very challenging to go back and undo merges which are quite complex.
5. on a given pr, it shows icons of all the participants but doesn't say which participant did what... for example if 5 people have just viewed a pr and done nothing else even then it shows all of them as participants. It would be nice to have a feature which will only show activity by participant on every pr.
6. text based Search via ui is practically no existent. So if you search for something using a text which is part of a commit message, chances are it will not show up 100%.

Fantastic git project management tool with good integrations

Pros

Full suite of tools including but not limited to repository and issue tracking, milestones & issue boards, group and user management including project and even branch level permissions, continuous integration, scheduled jobs, project wiki, etc. All the features work together and using it to manage projects tends to pulls the details together rather than fragmenting them across different spaces.

The general workflow is similar enough to Github that most developers find it familiar. In fact there is probably feature parity or beyond, so other than needing another account there has never been much resistance to adoption among our developer team. At the same time the interface well designed enough for non developers to figure it out and stay involved as well.

Cons

The setup and update process is somewhat cumbersome on bare metal (probably easier using dedicated virtual machines and/or their omnibus package). There are a lot of dependencies and assumptions about the environment that make it much the most dreaded package to upgrade on my production servers.

It does kind of make assumptions about workflow that don't hold true for all projects. While it is flexible enough to adapt even when using only a subset of features on a project, it can leave people a little confused and overwhelmed because all the other unused bits are still around in the interface.

Great tool, hard to use

Pros

Our team have been using both GitLab and its main competitor for a number of years. We use GitLab when our projects require a slight bit more fine-tuning and control over our repositories.
GitLab easily offers the ability to hide repos / projects from public view, something its competitors rarely do for free.
The team management within GitLab is great, we have multiple different teams in the system all with different access, and its very easy to share repositories with colleagues and control who can see what.
Integration with other Git applications is great, we use this with GitKraken all the time and we've never had problem.

Cons

My main problem with GitLab is its user-interface, in comparison to its competitors it's not good at all. Various functions seem to be hidden within obscure menus and hidden drop-downs. Not too much of a problem once you're used to it, but for new users, its a real issue.
The comment system isn't great, for some reason GitLab stores any and all edits that are made, meaning even the slightest change to a pull / merge comment is noted.

Intuitive, simple and effective way to setup CI/CD through "pipeline as code" paradigm.

A free way to be effective and to go straight to your goal. Lot of work is saved by this tool with respect to other similar solutions. This software is stable, you can install it wherever and it will work. You can upgrade it whenever with no surprise. Very nice tool. Forrester recommendations are all deserved.

Pros

Very simple and effective. Setting up a pipeline is immediate. It is pretty documented and also newbie can approach a good result in short time. Issue and agile management of a project is a big plus and recent capabilities to monitor project performances are impressive.
It is powered by docker containers and kubernetes and this make isolation and a sort of orchestration possible and easy.
People can focus on their own objective rather than spending time understanding the tool.

Cons

It is based on a project centric approach, but here the project is a single piece of code. Orchestration and release automation for complex scenarios must be delegated to other professional software. Standardisation of projects is not obvious since a pipeline refer to a single project. Environments refer to a single instance of an application. They are great but they do not easily correspond to what an environment usually means: an aggregation of nodes and software instances connected to each other.

Using this pro git tool for a year, I never need to look for alternatives...

Gitlab is our repository bank, It's powerful features (very less git providers have such) like branch level user access streamline our work.

Pros

-Even its free tier is really powerful to drive a full startup company, I used it for like a year.
-Really impressive UI/ Its web IDE (I use it for commit very critical patches/ resolve minor conflicts) is out of the box.
-It has everything like a user access control on repository level, that is too simple to use with Its web interface.
-Its support for CI/CD is really impressive, It provides these tools at its core in both free and paid tiers, I'm using Jenkins with it.
-Even it provides time tracking/ time estimate module in Its free tiers, I never used it but these things really look impressive, we even check it's applicability within our office and found it good to move in near future.
-The cheery pick is a little tricky git command, it provides this functionality at a button click (I really like it).

Cons

It's downtime when my team were using its free tier, we face downtime, runtime error or SSL downtime problem many times a day, but when we start using it paid services we are now less facing such issues.

Great, but missing some features.

It would be awesome to build out the profile view a bit more. I lead a team of developers and we use Gitlab and really like it for its privacy and ease of use, but because our repos are private we are unable to showcase our profile views on our portfolios etc. This has pushed me to split usage between gitlab and github. Gitlab for work / github for my private repos / gists / etc.

Pros

Price, private repos, ease of use for teams, (almost) all the features of github. We use gitlab for all of our client repos and it works great. Setting up teams and getting up and running is fast and easy. We've also looked into the option of self hosting gitlab on our own servers, but the web service is so good we haven't felt the need yet. UI is nice as well. Anyone familiar with github can easily jump in and enjoy gitlab.

Cons

Not as much community, profile view is not as robust / flushed out as gitlab. Feels private. Love the ease of private repos but that seems to be the main thing users are utilizing and there is less open source projects on gitlab. Also the profile view is not as well known as gitlab and there isn't the option to showcase private commits on your commit chart, which is a bummer.

Solid code and artifact repository that continues to evolve

Strong CI/CD contender which has increased our TTM.

Pros

Initially we looked at Gitlab for use as an internal code repository. We used gitlab in conjunction with jenkins and docker. Creating projects, submitting code, integrating Gitlab with Jenkins all worked well. To setup a jenkins pipeline with Gitlab is very straightforward. Just create a new pipeline, provide the gitlab project URL, and supply credentials. You can set Jenkins to poll at specific intervals, then kick off the CI/CD process when new commits are detected. At first we had provisioned a docker private registry, but gradually moved to hosting images using gitlab itself. The feature velocity is quite impressive and it looks like Gitlab will be able to handle the entire CI/CD pipeline in the future.

Cons

While the actual installation of GitLab wasn't too bad, figuring out how to configure Docker Engine to work with Gitlab was quite tricky. It's not well documented on the website but the key was to place the certs in the appropriate gitlab folder. It's always annoying to deal with TLS certs, especially if it's not clearly spelled out which path the application looks for the certs.

If you are a developer you will love this

Pros

Gitlab is free, open source and is a dream come true with its feature of unlimited private repositories. You can even put it on your own severs if you do not want to keep your code it on their servers. Gitlab is an amazing tool for developers and it even comes with CI now. It has a premium tier as well but one can gradually upgrade as one’s scale of operations and company size increases.

Cons

With gitlab there are really very few cons, the biggest reason is that they keep on improving their product at such a rapid pace and almost all of them are spot on in terms of user need and their implementation. It does hwever have a community size no where near services like Github has and we also need to consider the fact that almost every major open source project resides in Github. Also it does have a little downtime which does cause a little loss in productivity but with all its other features and the fact there is so much right there in the free tier itself I’m not complaining.

Simple and powerful

Pros

Intuitive and easy-to-use interface, enlisting and cloning repos, browsing & viewing files, switching between branches and repositories, configuring rights/groups, locking branches etc. We've integrated it with Jira and Jenkins and it worked seamlessly.

Cons

It needs to improve the interface and features for file comparison in merge requests and commit history.
1. Files with moderate amount of changes are collapsed by default. Many reviewers do not notice that and skip reviewing the code and miss major bugs.
2. Larger diffs are not even loaded in review window. Again, it's easy for reviewers to miss such files in merge requests.
3. When viewing the diff, you're limited to a certain unchanged area before and after the diff within the file. You'd have to view the entire file separately and locate the diff in plain file viewer.

The best code repo manager

I have been keeping all my software repos, which is the life blood of our business, on GItlab since quite some time.

Pros

When I started out freelancing I was very worried about where to keep all my code repositories. Though Github was available, the free tier did not allow private repos. Not only does Gitlab’s free tier gives me private repos they put no limits on the number of repositories as well and to top it all also supports Continuous Integration. I could also download their source code to host all our repos in our private server if need be. If you are a dev, signup for gitlab right now. You really do not know what you are missing.

Cons

There is nothing I would consider as a con to Gitlab, but just for the sake of being non biased I would say that it does miss a feature its arch rival Github provides for free and that is being able to host static pages right on their servers, from the HTML code in your repos. I wish Gitlab has this too.

Our main versioning system because of its easy of use

This software versioning system is very easy to use and allows us to have confidence in the fact that our software is always safe and protected.

Pros

The interface is clean and modern. It is easy to navigate and every option is in a logical place. The GitLab team is working very hard on updating the application, adding new features, improving the interface etc. and they are generally very good in updating customers about these changes. They also regularly send out security updates and information, which is very comforting for us as users.

Cons

Although the updates are helpful or improve something, the number of them, along with the fact that the changes they incorporate on the front-end are quite big, often mean that it takes me a few days to adjust to the changes of an update as I am looking for where certain features have been moved. In the end it is a minor inconvience, but I would appreciate less changes to user interface management.

The best version control solution I have ever used.

I've been using GitLab for years as my project management and version control solution. Having this vast tool-set in one place has significantly cut down on the tedium of trying to manage project across multiple services, and resulted in a drastically more efficient workflow.

Pros

GitLab is incredibly rich with features, too many to list here, all of which are fully integrated . The level of control and specificity you have at every step of the process is unparalleled, from project planning and issue tracking to code review and documentation. On top of that, the open-source nature of GitLab makes it really difficult not to recommend.

Cons

Just in my personal experience, I've found that the onboarding process for new collaborators can be somewhat intimidating when it comes to GitLab.

The absolute best git hosting solution, paid and unpaid

I have been using loads of git providers for years, GitLab when i want to host my own git server within a company. GitLab definitely gives GitHub a run for their money, I will continue to use it for the foreseeable future, and might even switch to it now that Microsoft own GitHub!

Pros

I love the fact that you have the option to host it yourself and you will have feature parity with the paid version. I run it at home for personal projects and its insane how much it can do out of the box with no set up at all. Despite not being a paid customer i recommend the paid version to colleagues regularly.

Cons

I honestly have nothing bad to say about GitLab - maybe the command line set up is a bit hard for beginners - but they provide a paid version so that beginners don't have to set it up! 10/10

I installed and run Gitlab Community Edition for my job, open to everyone.

The more we use the continous integration, the more development is easy for us. We manage to create a workflow that allow non-tech people to contribute to HTML code, knowing that it will be valid HTML code thanks to CI. We also use the continous integration to automatically deploy softwares on our infrastructure, reducing our workload.

Pros

I like so many things about Gitlab. Continuous integration with Gitlab runners, the Gitlab pages, the webhook system, the fact that it comes with a Mattermost instance

And the fact that it continously gain features with each monthly release it's like Christmas presents every month!

Cons

Well, the backup of Gitlab takes time, and it sometimes slows down the server. But hey! Security first! And it's not the fault of the software if we host a lot of people and projects.

I used Gitlab when I was a member of the Programing development team in Parrot.

Pros

Full suite of tools including but not limited to repository and issue tracking, milestones & issue boards, group and user management including project and even branch level permissions, continuous integration, scheduled jobs, project wiki, etc. All the features work together and using it to manage projects tends to pulls the details together rather than fragmenting them across different spaces.

Cons

It does kind of make assumptions about workflow that don't hold true for all projects. While it is flexible enough to adapt even when using only a subset of features on a project, it can leave people a little confused and overwhelmed because all the other unused bits are still around in the interface.

GitLab for git Management

Managing multiple repos is a breeze with GitLab.

Pros

GitLab is the perfect implementation of a git version control. My favorite parts of GitLab are the extremely confgiruable role-based access levels I can implement for my repositories - allowing people at all levels of my company to freely interact with our source code without having to worry about certain user groups being able to see certain proprietary content or accidentally deleting the entire repo.

Cons

Older versions of GitLab lacked certain quality of life features such as an in-browser diff tool. However new version of GitLab are constantly coming out with new features like this even in the free version so it's not a big complaint.

A great alternative to the market leader

GitLab was a lifesaver for us as a small startup development team. Once we graduated to more enterprise-grade development, we switched from GitLab to the market leader, however we didn't NEED to "upgrade" for any particular reason.

Pros

GitLab has all the functionality of the other major players in this segment and even a few unique ones, all for a better price, especially if you self-host. For an small development team, it was invaluable to get all the benefits of git in a free self-hosted repository platform.

Cons

There are not many cons, but the one is that it is NOT the largest market leader (trying to not use their name in this review). While there is a large community for GitLab, if you are troubleshooting or trying to figure out exactly how certain features work, you'll end up with a lot of results for GH instead of GitLab.

GitLab was the right choice to store our source code!

GitLab is a great tool with plenty of features! Managing source code has never been so easy.

Pros

GitLab has been very trustworthy and secure. We are paying for a premium version of GitLab and has been very easy to use. Many developers are very happy about being able to have their own space. Pushing and pulling down code has been a breeze and GitLab integrates with many other apps! Making and accepting merge requests is a must!

Cons

CI is a nice integration however we decided not to use it after awhile and went with using Concourse. The integration felt clunky, slow and sometimes glitches.

Absolutely great experience, almost every thing you need in one interface.

This software helped me to manage the team of developers and offered a single interface for many actions.

Pros

A great UI, single interface for Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment, Easy to use API and well documented. Deployments are great and easy to roll back.
Multi environment deployments. Short release cycle and upgrading is super easy I have been using it since version 7 and never had problems while upgrading.

Cons

Did not manage to use monitoring not well documented, not many bad things about this software.
Cannot audit user activity in community version.