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I've been a long-time Github user and believer and vaguely followed Gitlab since their beginnings. Much as I admired their company and business, I had a lot of

I've been a long-time Github user and believer and vaguely followed Gitlab since their beginnings. Much as I admired their company and business, I had a lot of problems with their UI, UX and scattered focus. Then very recently I've had to use Gitlab for a variety of new projects. And just... wow, it has come a long way. There is an incredible amount of tooling and features, native to Gitlab. It's actually scary, and in some places even gets messy (feature overload). But a lot of it is useful stuff Github really should be offering. Things like more metadata on projects, subprojects. A very in-depth permission system (invite users with read-only access, issue-only access; membership expiration, ...). Branch protection integrated into various features. Native CI! That's the big one. Travis is terrible. I used Gitlab CI to deploy one of my most recent project and ... it's been great. Was very simple to configure, felt a lot less magic and constrained than Travis, and it's very well integrated into Gitlab. All this to say that I'm just about converted. Unfortunately, I have my 10+ year old profile on Github which includes membership to various projects and orgs, but I'm now pretty definitely using both platforms. Edit: Here's my Github profile so people know I mean business when I'm praising Gitlab. https://github.com/jleclanche https://github.com/jleclanche

dasmoth 8y ago
It certainly seems to fill a niche. That said, I rather miss the minimalism and focus on individual developers (vs organisations and processes) of early Github.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  Do you think that focus is gone? I find both Gitlab and Github have plenty of focus on the dev (Github more so). It just so happens that Github has developed a lot of tooling for orgs and projects since. Compare to Bitbucket's profile pages for example: https://bitbucket.org/astanin/ https://bitbucket.org/astanin/
  - dasmoth 8y ago
    Do you think that focus is gone? Obviously, this comes down to opinion, but honestly: yes. In the case of GitHub, the point where I reached that conclusion was when they added built-in enforcement of code review workflows. A feature which I seem to recall they copied more-or-less directly from GitLab... (And I'm not saying it's wrong for everyone. But diversity is nice...)
    - scrollaway 8y ago
      I'm not sure I follow. Do you think improving in other areas means the focus is no longer on the dev? Github, when it came out, was the only platform that even had proper profile pages for developers. They coined the whole "social coding" thing. I find that whenever I interact with other people on the site, I actively look at their profiles, their contributions, etc. An example of a recent-ish feature they added which IMO is a good example of "focus on the dev": Comment authors are tagged as "Owner", "Member", "Contributor" and "First-time contributor" in comment streams.
      - stonogo 8y ago
        > Github, when it came out, was the only platform that even had proper profile pages for developers. This turns out not to be the case. Sourceforge had many or all of these features in the early 2000s.
        scrollaway 8y ago
        The same way FTP had all the features of Dropbox before Dropbox was a thing? Usability matters. Sourceforge was atrocious.
        stonogo 8y ago
        No, it became atrocious. The world moved on and SourceForge did not, which is why superior offerings arrived. And to your first "question", no. It had them in almost exactly the same incarnation as modern sites, but with a UX design language rooted (fatally) in the "best practices" of the web at the time. Unlike all the crazy things you'd have to do around FTP to get it to act like DropBox, SourceForge had the mentioned features built in from the start. It doesn't really win GitHub any prizes to pretend otherwise, so I'm not sure why the pushback against simple facts.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pritianka 8y ago
Thanks for the balanced viewpoint! Appreciate you sticking with us :-)
bogomipz 8y ago
>"I've been a long-time Github user and believer and vaguely followed Gitlab since their beginnings. Much as I admired their company and business, I had a lot of problems with their UI, UX and scattered focus." I had a similar experience where we had gitlab in a previous job(recent past.) The scattered focus seemed to be manifest for me anyway in their documentation. Finding documentation often involved going down a rabbit hole of user issues rather than looking in the official documentation. Additionally I found a lot of the documentation seemed incomplete and read more like internal notes than anything else. The contrast being github which has very polished and thorough documentation.
- sytse 8y ago
  What is the topic in our documentation you think we should improve first?
  - bogomipz 8y ago
    Thoroughness? Accuracy? Here's an example. Someone attempting to upgrade their omnibus package installed instance will likely find the following resource: https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/update/ https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/update/ This page links to the following "upgrade recommendations" resource: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/policy/maintenance.html#upgrade-recommendations https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/policy/maintenance.html#upgrade-r... This above page states "We encourage everyone to run the latest stable release", we contains an embedded link. And when you follow that link it returns a 404 with a cutesy error page! See for yourself: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/categories/release/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/categories/release/ Further none of those pages explains how to pass in a specific version of the omnibus package to satisfy the upgrade process in the even that the latest version fails because the upgrade version differential is not supported. It was really frustrating. And this is but one small example of course. But I think this is typical.
    - sytse 8y ago
      Thanks for the examples. I've asked someone to look into this. And we'll consider setting up a service to scan for 404s in our docs to prevent this in the future.
tootie 8y ago
I honestly don't understand why anyone uses GitHub for professional projects. It's inferior to not only GitLab but also Bitbucket.
- enraged_camel 8y ago
  "No one ever got fired for buying IBM."
  - tootie 8y ago
    I feel like Atlassian is IBM in this scenario. Bitbucket, JIRA and Confluence isn't everyone's favorite but you know they get the job done.
    - amdelamar 8y ago
      Of course, IBM has Rational Team Concert. It did... everything. But even teams within IBM were switching to GitHub Enterprise last I was there.
- onion2k 8y ago
  I use all three, and I still like GitHub. It works well, and it's incredibly well supported in the wider ecosystem of services - every CI product, bug tracker, comms product and analytics tool you can think of integrates with Github. Plus, for most large-ish projects, the web UI isn't where anyone spends much time so it doesn't really matter.
- Someguywhatever 8y ago
  Network effects really, that and name familiarity possibly?
- matthewmacleod 8y ago
  Well, because it's cheap, I have literally no issues or problems with it, it has all the features I need, integrates with everything, and is the most popular repository of open source code. Why move unless there's a compelling reason to?

dasmoth 8y ago

It certainly seems to fill a niche. That said, I rather miss the minimalism and focus on individual developers (vs organisations and processes) of early Github.

scrollaway 8y ago
Do you think that focus is gone? I find both Gitlab and Github have plenty of focus on the dev (Github more so). It just so happens that Github has developed a lot of tooling for orgs and projects since. Compare to Bitbucket's profile pages for example: https://bitbucket.org/astanin/ https://bitbucket.org/astanin/
- dasmoth 8y ago
  Do you think that focus is gone? Obviously, this comes down to opinion, but honestly: yes. In the case of GitHub, the point where I reached that conclusion was when they added built-in enforcement of code review workflows. A feature which I seem to recall they copied more-or-less directly from GitLab... (And I'm not saying it's wrong for everyone. But diversity is nice...)
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    I'm not sure I follow. Do you think improving in other areas means the focus is no longer on the dev? Github, when it came out, was the only platform that even had proper profile pages for developers. They coined the whole "social coding" thing. I find that whenever I interact with other people on the site, I actively look at their profiles, their contributions, etc. An example of a recent-ish feature they added which IMO is a good example of "focus on the dev": Comment authors are tagged as "Owner", "Member", "Contributor" and "First-time contributor" in comment streams.
    - stonogo 8y ago
      > Github, when it came out, was the only platform that even had proper profile pages for developers. This turns out not to be the case. Sourceforge had many or all of these features in the early 2000s.
      - scrollaway 8y ago
        The same way FTP had all the features of Dropbox before Dropbox was a thing? Usability matters. Sourceforge was atrocious.
        stonogo 8y ago
        No, it became atrocious. The world moved on and SourceForge did not, which is why superior offerings arrived. And to your first "question", no. It had them in almost exactly the same incarnation as modern sites, but with a UX design language rooted (fatally) in the "best practices" of the web at the time. Unlike all the crazy things you'd have to do around FTP to get it to act like DropBox, SourceForge had the mentioned features built in from the start. It doesn't really win GitHub any prizes to pretend otherwise, so I'm not sure why the pushback against simple facts.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pritianka 8y ago

Thanks for the balanced viewpoint! Appreciate you sticking with us :-)

bogomipz 8y ago

>"I've been a long-time Github user and believer and vaguely followed Gitlab since their beginnings. Much as I admired their company and business, I had a lot of problems with their UI, UX and scattered focus." I had a similar experience where we had gitlab in a previous job(recent past.) The scattered focus seemed to be manifest for me anyway in their documentation. Finding documentation often involved going down a rabbit hole of user issues rather than looking in the official documentation. Additionally I found a lot of the documentation seemed incomplete and read more like internal notes than anything else. The contrast being github which has very polished and thorough documentation.

sytse 8y ago
What is the topic in our documentation you think we should improve first?
- bogomipz 8y ago
  Thoroughness? Accuracy? Here's an example. Someone attempting to upgrade their omnibus package installed instance will likely find the following resource: https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/update/ https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/update/ This page links to the following "upgrade recommendations" resource: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/policy/maintenance.html#upgrade-recommendations https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/policy/maintenance.html#upgrade-r... This above page states "We encourage everyone to run the latest stable release", we contains an embedded link. And when you follow that link it returns a 404 with a cutesy error page! See for yourself: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/categories/release/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/categories/release/ Further none of those pages explains how to pass in a specific version of the omnibus package to satisfy the upgrade process in the even that the latest version fails because the upgrade version differential is not supported. It was really frustrating. And this is but one small example of course. But I think this is typical.
  - sytse 8y ago
    Thanks for the examples. I've asked someone to look into this. And we'll consider setting up a service to scan for 404s in our docs to prevent this in the future.

tootie 8y ago

I honestly don't understand why anyone uses GitHub for professional projects. It's inferior to not only GitLab but also Bitbucket.

enraged_camel 8y ago
"No one ever got fired for buying IBM."
- tootie 8y ago
  I feel like Atlassian is IBM in this scenario. Bitbucket, JIRA and Confluence isn't everyone's favorite but you know they get the job done.
  - amdelamar 8y ago
    Of course, IBM has Rational Team Concert. It did... everything. But even teams within IBM were switching to GitHub Enterprise last I was there.
onion2k 8y ago
I use all three, and I still like GitHub. It works well, and it's incredibly well supported in the wider ecosystem of services - every CI product, bug tracker, comms product and analytics tool you can think of integrates with Github. Plus, for most large-ish projects, the web UI isn't where anyone spends much time so it doesn't really matter.
Someguywhatever 8y ago
Network effects really, that and name familiarity possibly?
matthewmacleod 8y ago
Well, because it's cheap, I have literally no issues or problems with it, it has all the features I need, integrates with everything, and is the most popular repository of open source code. Why move unless there's a compelling reason to?