6 ms·

If you're starting a company today, would you use Gitlab over it's competitors (Atlassian, GitHub)? And keep in mind, I'm not talking about specifically using

If you're starting a company today, would you use Gitlab over it's competitors (Atlassian, GitHub)? And keep in mind, I'm not talking about specifically using GitLab for "git". I mean, what technology stack would you use for: - Issue tracking - VCS - Developer Chat - CI/CD - Project Boards / Project Management I actually just asked this question today [1] but didn't get much of a response. I know Atlassian is not properly but for a fully stack software development experience, it seems like my only true options are either GitLab or Atlassian (not GitHub). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14394123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14394123

d1ffuz0r 9y ago
Yes, I'm using and planing to use gitlab for all my current and future private projects instead of github. Keeping github for public stuff though
edoceo 9y ago
I started recently, we're on git+gitlab(hosted), slack, Trello. We use Trello for all the tracking: support and bugs and features. I like the gitlab CI but we're not taking full advantage yet
- tiffanyh 9y ago
  Just curious, if you're already using Trello - why not just use Atlassian since they bought Trello. Atlassian has HipChat (slack competitor), has Bitbucket (gitlab competitor), and has CI/CD. You could make Atlassian a one-stop shop for all your software development needs. Note: I do NOT work for any of the companies listed above. So I'm not secretly promoting my employer.
  - apocalyptic0n3 9y ago
    Not OP, but we looked at a full Atlassian stack about a year ago. At the time anyway, it was very expensive for us and offered little benefit besides easy SSO. Plus we found that, in general, HipChat was inferior to Slack and Bitbucket inferior to GitLab. And the gap has increased steadily since then from what I have seen. In the end, we're running with: - Redmine for project management. JIRA is extremely painful to use as an agency with hundreds of active projects in our experience. GitLab issues are only now getting to a level where they could be useful for us - GitLab for Git Repo hosting - Jenkins for CI (and hopefully CD in the near future). This could be handled by GitLab now but we were all more comfortable at the time with Jenkins (when we decided on Jenkins, GitLab CI was still a thing) - G Suite for email/calendar/docs/file sharing - Slack for inter-office communication - Zabbix for server monitoring I'm currently re-evaluating our decisions and determining if these are the best options going forward. We're also considering writing our own project management/CRM/SEO software that actually fits our needs (we've yet to find a one-size-fits-all solution for all aspects of our business), but that is a huge investment that can't be taken lightly and I doubt will happen.
    - connorshea 9y ago
      I'm a Community Advocate at GitLab, what features are you missing from GitLab issues that prevented you from switching?
      - apocalyptic0n3 9y ago
        I think this may have been addressed in a recent release, but projects involve far more than just the development team; Design, project management, video/photography, client, SEO, etc. will all need to be using the system as well. Beyond that, a project starts long before development is even thought about. Most of those teams will be doing work, that needs to be tracked, well before we're ready to create a code repo. With the way things are (or were), code is front and center and half the team doesn't care about that at all. There are also projects that have no development at all from the other teams (video/photo shoots, SEO for customers we didn't build sites for, etc.) You can only have one code base per repo, too. So our PM may go in and create a project for an app and then when we go to develop, realize we need two separate projects. Or maybe they will go create a new project for a new version of an existing site, but we will still be using the same codebase. It makes sense from their view point to track it separately and with a clean slate while from a code standpoint, it makes absolutely no sense. Beyond that, I personally have 74 tickets assigned to me across a dozen or so projects. PMs are tracking tickets in dozens of projects simultaneously. The last time I looked, there was no good way of seeing an overview of everything like that. Organizing by client while also ensuring that all users have access to all repos without allowing public access to the repo is also a pain. If we were only a development company, we'd use it for sure. But GitLab is too tied to the code to be a complete project management tool. There's also the issue that we want to have our CRM in the same place (it currently isn't) and there is no way GitLab will ever offer that.
        tyldum 9y ago
        +1 for the top level overview, although subgroups is a step in the right direction
        cmatija 9y ago
- sytse 9y ago
  Any reason why you're using Trello instead of GitLab Issue Boards? https://about.gitlab.com/features/issueboard/ https://about.gitlab.com/features/issueboard/
  - Aeyris 9y ago
    Can you have public issue boards on private repositories (or private code repositories on public projects) with GitLab? Trello is good for that sort of "feature request" behaviour.
    - sytse 9y ago
      Yes, you can set the access for each component of GitLab individually.
problems 9y ago
Self-hosted Gitlab+Mattermost has been a very good bet for us so far. JIRA was on the table too as it's more feature rich, but the costs were several times higher (especially when you start tacking on their CI tooling and stuff). GitHub however was just too feature poor to be considered seriously - less features than GitLab and it's priced higher than JIRA.
- tiffanyh 9y ago
  >>"Self-hosted Gitlab+Mattermost has been a very good bet for us so far." Any reason to use Mattermost now given that GitLab acquired Gitter (chat) [1]? [1] https://venturebeat.com/2017/03/15/gitlab-acquires-software-chat-startup-gitter-will-open-source-the-code/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/03/15/gitlab-acquires-software-...
  - andrewstuart2 9y ago
    Well, for one, it's still supported and actively included as part of this GitLab release [1]. I'm not sure their Gitter acquisition is intended to replace Mattermost. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it was integrated as an open, zero-overhead chat solution for a gitlab project, and then have it also presented in the mattermost client as a separate room for each project. That would be a really nice integration so that as a Dev, I don't need another chat client or browser window running, but I'm also not requiring my users to install my chat client or sign in separately in order to communicate. That said, I have no idea if their plans are similar to this or not. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/2017/05/22/gitlab-9-2-released/#omnibus-improvements https://about.gitlab.com/2017/05/22/gitlab-9-2-released/#omn...
    - connorshea 9y ago
      We describe our plans for Gitter / Mattermost in this blog post: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/ We intend to keep both around as they serve different purposes :)
101km 9y ago
Beware of cargo cults. Edit: Pointing out that you might not actually need to muck about with all this stuff when you're just starting out is not unreasonable.
givehimagun 9y ago
What about TFS or Visual Studio Online through BizSpark? https://bizspark.microsoft.com/ https://bizspark.microsoft.com/
- foota 9y ago
  I love the TFS issues system.
merb 9y ago
I used both. While Atlassian didn't included everything by default and misses lots of features (due to their plugin system which means that they don't necessary think they need to implement stuff) and Atlassian uses more resource and does not support git:// urls only the ugly ssh:// once. If I think back I should've never switched from Jira+Stash+Jenkins, however we did the Switch to GitLab and somehow I'm not 100% happy. It's way way slower a lot of things in CE are just missing and the costs for our < 10 user company would be way higher with gitlab ee. gitlab is easy to upgrade and the maintance feels a little bit more easy since jira/stash backup is way more complicated. however the jira is way better at managing issues (even the lightweight version of the boards is more simple and easier to use) and stash is extremly fast compared to anything on gitlab. at the end everything has their tradeoffs, but I would prefer the Atlassian Stack since it never broke anything, while on GitLab we often run into issues (especially CI related)
- sytse 9y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. What do you need in GitLab to manage issues better? Sorry to hear you ran into problems with your self hosted GitLab. What CI problem was the most disruptive?
  - merb 9y ago
    Well to not write a wall of text, this were the most "disruptive" things: - compared to JIRA Agile the issue board is a joke (it's hard to actually describe the differences, but basically we can't use the gitlab issue board since it either doesn't work correctly when closing issues via push or it just isn't as understandable as the jira versions) - docker and the ci is a horrible experience (we had a jenkins build before, which always worked, however even the ssh way of gitlab ci sometimes fails randomly or can't be canceled or whatever) Positive thinks about gitlab: - your at least listening (while atlassian is not, they mostly care for their big customers) however stability and performance should be your number one priority and not adding more stuff that might make that stuff worse. sometimes it's good to not add more stuff in some versions.
    - 9y ago

d1ffuz0r 9y ago

Yes, I'm using and planing to use gitlab for all my current and future private projects instead of github. Keeping github for public stuff though

edoceo 9y ago

I started recently, we're on git+gitlab(hosted), slack, Trello. We use Trello for all the tracking: support and bugs and features. I like the gitlab CI but we're not taking full advantage yet

tiffanyh 9y ago
Just curious, if you're already using Trello - why not just use Atlassian since they bought Trello. Atlassian has HipChat (slack competitor), has Bitbucket (gitlab competitor), and has CI/CD. You could make Atlassian a one-stop shop for all your software development needs. Note: I do NOT work for any of the companies listed above. So I'm not secretly promoting my employer.
- apocalyptic0n3 9y ago
  Not OP, but we looked at a full Atlassian stack about a year ago. At the time anyway, it was very expensive for us and offered little benefit besides easy SSO. Plus we found that, in general, HipChat was inferior to Slack and Bitbucket inferior to GitLab. And the gap has increased steadily since then from what I have seen. In the end, we're running with: - Redmine for project management. JIRA is extremely painful to use as an agency with hundreds of active projects in our experience. GitLab issues are only now getting to a level where they could be useful for us - GitLab for Git Repo hosting - Jenkins for CI (and hopefully CD in the near future). This could be handled by GitLab now but we were all more comfortable at the time with Jenkins (when we decided on Jenkins, GitLab CI was still a thing) - G Suite for email/calendar/docs/file sharing - Slack for inter-office communication - Zabbix for server monitoring I'm currently re-evaluating our decisions and determining if these are the best options going forward. We're also considering writing our own project management/CRM/SEO software that actually fits our needs (we've yet to find a one-size-fits-all solution for all aspects of our business), but that is a huge investment that can't be taken lightly and I doubt will happen.
  - connorshea 9y ago
    I'm a Community Advocate at GitLab, what features are you missing from GitLab issues that prevented you from switching?
    - apocalyptic0n3 9y ago
      I think this may have been addressed in a recent release, but projects involve far more than just the development team; Design, project management, video/photography, client, SEO, etc. will all need to be using the system as well. Beyond that, a project starts long before development is even thought about. Most of those teams will be doing work, that needs to be tracked, well before we're ready to create a code repo. With the way things are (or were), code is front and center and half the team doesn't care about that at all. There are also projects that have no development at all from the other teams (video/photo shoots, SEO for customers we didn't build sites for, etc.) You can only have one code base per repo, too. So our PM may go in and create a project for an app and then when we go to develop, realize we need two separate projects. Or maybe they will go create a new project for a new version of an existing site, but we will still be using the same codebase. It makes sense from their view point to track it separately and with a clean slate while from a code standpoint, it makes absolutely no sense. Beyond that, I personally have 74 tickets assigned to me across a dozen or so projects. PMs are tracking tickets in dozens of projects simultaneously. The last time I looked, there was no good way of seeing an overview of everything like that. Organizing by client while also ensuring that all users have access to all repos without allowing public access to the repo is also a pain. If we were only a development company, we'd use it for sure. But GitLab is too tied to the code to be a complete project management tool. There's also the issue that we want to have our CRM in the same place (it currently isn't) and there is no way GitLab will ever offer that.
      - tyldum 9y ago
        +1 for the top level overview, although subgroups is a step in the right direction
      - cmatija 9y ago
sytse 9y ago
Any reason why you're using Trello instead of GitLab Issue Boards? https://about.gitlab.com/features/issueboard/ https://about.gitlab.com/features/issueboard/
- Aeyris 9y ago
  Can you have public issue boards on private repositories (or private code repositories on public projects) with GitLab? Trello is good for that sort of "feature request" behaviour.
  - sytse 9y ago
    Yes, you can set the access for each component of GitLab individually.

problems 9y ago

Self-hosted Gitlab+Mattermost has been a very good bet for us so far. JIRA was on the table too as it's more feature rich, but the costs were several times higher (especially when you start tacking on their CI tooling and stuff). GitHub however was just too feature poor to be considered seriously - less features than GitLab and it's priced higher than JIRA.

tiffanyh 9y ago
>>"Self-hosted Gitlab+Mattermost has been a very good bet for us so far." Any reason to use Mattermost now given that GitLab acquired Gitter (chat) [1]? [1] https://venturebeat.com/2017/03/15/gitlab-acquires-software-chat-startup-gitter-will-open-source-the-code/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/03/15/gitlab-acquires-software-...
- andrewstuart2 9y ago
  Well, for one, it's still supported and actively included as part of this GitLab release [1]. I'm not sure their Gitter acquisition is intended to replace Mattermost. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it was integrated as an open, zero-overhead chat solution for a gitlab project, and then have it also presented in the mattermost client as a separate room for each project. That would be a really nice integration so that as a Dev, I don't need another chat client or browser window running, but I'm also not requiring my users to install my chat client or sign in separately in order to communicate. That said, I have no idea if their plans are similar to this or not. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/2017/05/22/gitlab-9-2-released/#omnibus-improvements https://about.gitlab.com/2017/05/22/gitlab-9-2-released/#omn...
  - connorshea 9y ago
    We describe our plans for Gitter / Mattermost in this blog post: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/ We intend to keep both around as they serve different purposes :)

101km 9y ago

Beware of cargo cults. Edit: Pointing out that you might not actually need to muck about with all this stuff when you're just starting out is not unreasonable.

givehimagun 9y ago

What about TFS or Visual Studio Online through BizSpark? https://bizspark.microsoft.com/ https://bizspark.microsoft.com/

foota 9y ago
I love the TFS issues system.

merb 9y ago

I used both. While Atlassian didn't included everything by default and misses lots of features (due to their plugin system which means that they don't necessary think they need to implement stuff) and Atlassian uses more resource and does not support git:// urls only the ugly ssh:// once. If I think back I should've never switched from Jira+Stash+Jenkins, however we did the Switch to GitLab and somehow I'm not 100% happy. It's way way slower a lot of things in CE are just missing and the costs for our < 10 user company would be way higher with gitlab ee. gitlab is easy to upgrade and the maintance feels a little bit more easy since jira/stash backup is way more complicated. however the jira is way better at managing issues (even the lightweight version of the boards is more simple and easier to use) and stash is extremly fast compared to anything on gitlab. at the end everything has their tradeoffs, but I would prefer the Atlassian Stack since it never broke anything, while on GitLab we often run into issues (especially CI related)

sytse 9y ago
Thanks for the feedback. What do you need in GitLab to manage issues better? Sorry to hear you ran into problems with your self hosted GitLab. What CI problem was the most disruptive?
- merb 9y ago
  Well to not write a wall of text, this were the most "disruptive" things: - compared to JIRA Agile the issue board is a joke (it's hard to actually describe the differences, but basically we can't use the gitlab issue board since it either doesn't work correctly when closing issues via push or it just isn't as understandable as the jira versions) - docker and the ci is a horrible experience (we had a jenkins build before, which always worked, however even the ssh way of gitlab ci sometimes fails randomly or can't be canceled or whatever) Positive thinks about gitlab: - your at least listening (while atlassian is not, they mostly care for their big customers) however stability and performance should be your number one priority and not adding more stuff that might make that stuff worse. sometimes it's good to not add more stuff in some versions.
  - 9y ago