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Kudos to the team. While my current workspace is tied to GitHub, I will most certainly switch to Gitlab given the option to. Why? Only one reason: GitHub suppor

• aeonflux 7y ago
  I can totally relate to that. In flood of notifications I missed information about expiring CC. Instead of somehow soft-locking the account they just downgraded it and all my integrations, hooks and god knows what just blowed. I managed to fix the CC in 5 minutes, but many months after I am still recovering from that disaster. Support replied that they did send warning so I should just FO.
  • tyingq 7y ago
    That's a terrible process. As you say, a "soft lock" of some kind is the obvious fix. They are basically encouraging you to jump ship because at that point, it's a similar effort to move to another vendor.
  • en-us 7y ago
    IMO at that point since you have to rebuild everything anyway, just rebuild it with a different vendor. No reason to stay with a company that treats you like that.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • scient 7y ago
    So you are blaming them for your own fault?
    • gnud 7y ago
      Pretty sure he's blaming them for deleting all his configurations, not for disabling them once the CC bounced. And I agree. If that happened to me, I would move, without a doubt.
    • hombre_fatal 7y ago
      There are graceful, helpful ways to deal with accidents, and then there are awful, hostile ways. Ideally your service provider helps you through accidents. Both sides benefit from that.
    • urbanjunkie 7y ago
      You are an unpleasant little cunt, aren't you?
  • 52-6F-62 7y ago
    Oh that's odd. We've been running into CC issues on our team and we were "disabled". So we had no access to our production repos but AFAIK nothing was downgraded.
• COMMENT___ 7y ago
  Could you please tell more about your experience with GitLab vs GitHub support team? What kind of problems did they help (or did not help) solve?
  • dsumenkovic 7y ago
    Hi! GitLab employee here. While someone else from the community provides the feedback, I'd like to highlight what our support team can provide. > GitLab offers a variety of support options for all customers and users on both paid and free tiers. You should be able to find help using the resources linked below, regardless of how you use GitLab. https://about.gitlab.com/support/ https://about.gitlab.com/support/
    • COMMENT___ 7y ago
      I do not understand your comment and - frankly speaking - it looks like this is a canned response made by a bot. Please highlight why and how GitLab support team is better than X with some examples. I really want to learn about real cases.
      • dsumenkovic 7y ago
        I am sorry if it sounds like that, as my intention was just to provide some more data while waiting for the real case feedback. Hopefully, some users will provide their personal experiences.
        • prepend 7y ago
          Still sounds like chatbot :) I appreciate you’re trying to be helpful but don’t really have any useful info.
          • emilycook 7y ago
            Hi! I'm on Djorde's team, just in case anyone stumbles across this and thinks you're literally talking to a bot (not saying you are OP, just preventative), he is a non-native English speaker but definitely a real person. You're talking to this guy :) https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/#sumenkovic https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/#sumenkovic
• hobofan 7y ago
  > instead of stealing TravisCIs ideas (cough GitHub Actions Cough) Not sure how you come to that conclusion. Even _if_ that were true, that would probably be a good thing now that TravisCI is on life support.
  • alvern 7y ago
    Forgive my ignorance, but how is TravisCI on lifesupport? Is this because Idera aquired them?
    • nicoburns 7y ago
      It seems very flaky to me. We're currently migrating off Travis (probably to Azure pipelines) at my workplace.
    • jen20 7y ago
      They fired many of their developers and key operations folks, and service has been flaky for months. It was already poor, but is now substantially worse than almost all of the competition.
    • jrochkind1 7y ago
      They were purchased by a private equity company. Which does not usually mean any continued development. At it's best, it means keep the thing running well and continue to wring revenue out of it. But few and far between are the private equity purchases that are at their best. It also almost always means significant cost cutting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251
      • hobofan 7y ago
        It's not just any private equity company, but one that is known for purchasing companies with a big subscriber base and then getting as much money out of them with the least effort.
  • tbrock 7y ago
    In my experience CircleCI is an excellent alternative.
• mstade 7y ago
  That's interesting, my experience with GH support is the polar opposite – they've been stellar. Particularly their enterprise support went above and beyond when we had issues and never did I feel I got either a canned response or even had to wait particularly long to receive an answer. At one point we had an issue with a flaky load balancer sometimes dropping connections, but the folks maintaining the load balancer were adamant that it was a fault with GHE. Even though I was certain it was the load balancer, I reached out to GH for support and they not only responded with helpful tips to determine whether the GHE instance had a problem, but also helped me build my case that it was in fact the load balancer that was at fault. Turns out the issue was a broken NIC on the load balancer, and GH support were instrumental in helping us figure this out, even though a perfectly acceptable response from them would've been "not our product – good luck; have fun" or something to that effect. Really surprised to hear about your experience with their support, mine's really been nothing but positive. To be fair, I haven't interacted with them for well over a year now since I'm no longer involved in maintaining GHE. Did support take a hit after the Microsoft takeover?
  • jakeogh 7y ago
    I sent them a msg about 2FA recently and got a real reply that didnt sidestep the question/problem.
    • dorsatum 7y ago
      same, issues with 2FA and not considered at all
  • lkozloff 7y ago
    I've only been a free user on GitHub, but I've also been impressed with their support. I once had a question about how they handle a very particular situation with forking workflows and private groups. The rep was very knowledgable and took the time to explain exactly what would happen. This was years ago, but I appreciated the support at the time, and as a Support Manager at GitLab would still point to it as an example of a quality response.
• phillco 7y ago
  I've had the same experience with GHE support.
• thibaut_barrere 7y ago
  I had only very good experiences with GitHub support (on the limited number of times I actually needed it). > GitHub has lost its way I've been a very early adopter, and I do not have the same impression at all today. Working with something else than GitHub is painful for me (& I'm using a number of other hosts for various clients).
• abrichr 7y ago
  > There are so many things that can make life easier for users (better configurability for CODEOWNERS notification?) Can you please elaborate on this? What type of configurability are you looking for? What other things do you think would make life easier for users? Please feel free to email me!
• throwaway77384 7y ago
  Still waiting for them to respond about a month later. Chased up multiple times. Nothing. They won't keep me as a customer much longer.
  • emilycook 7y ago
    Hi! GitLab employee, if you wanna reach out to me directly, I can try to triage to the right team: ecook@gitlab.com
    • ubercore 7y ago
      It's awesome that you're willing to help out, but increasingly these kind of interactions leave me with a bad impression -- I don't want to have to complain in a public forum to get some kind of meaningful response. Not calling you out on this personally, just noting a general trend that's become really common the last few years.
      • bamboozled 7y ago
        I feel the same when I see Gitlab posts on HN, always seems to be a lot of apologetic behaviour after the fact, it’s a bit cringe worthy. I don’t see it from competitors nor do I see the long string of terrible complaints, handle your business in advance this doesn’t have to happen.
        • ensignavenger 7y ago
          There are actually quite a few complaints on here about GitHub support, the difference is that Gitlab employees are replying to the complaints against their company. Seems like a lot of Gitlab employees follow Hacker News and want to help out. (It appears that Gitlab actually pays some of them to do this as part of their job, whereas for others it is not in their job description).
          • emilycook 7y ago
            Hi yes! Someone who gets paid to do this here :P just wanted to give some background on my team (not that you asked for it OP, I just like to talk about myself apparently). But yeah my team (of 3 members lol) was spun up primarily because Sid our CEO wants to make sure that everyone in the company is plugged into what users are saying about us, and he cares about hackernews specifically since GitLab was founded here [1]. So my team mainly just triages mentions about us so devs/managers/etc don't miss feedback but can still focus on their jobs. I do see first-hand that everyone in the company really does care about what people are experiencing. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/company/history/#2012-gitlabcom https://about.gitlab.com/company/history/#2012-gitlabcom
• oh_boy 7y ago
  Not sure what exact experience you made with the GitLab support but I can tell you our experience is different. It took over two months to resolve a license request we made to their support (or sales team) with multiple pushes from our side, every week. There are bugs with the CI system like an issue with the cache retrieval when multiple jobs run in different pipelines parallel to each other, that is actually blocking us from using the cache to it's meant extend and that was issued in 2016. You will find a dozens of those tickets. Just some examples. Wouldn't say GitLab is the heaven on earth GitHub isn't. It just has it's own, different issues.
  • joshlambert 7y ago
    Hi - I'm sorry for the experience you had. I'm the PM for our Runner team, and we're focusing our next milestone purely on fixing some high priority outstanding bugs, that have been open for longer than they should have. Is this the issue you are referring to about the cache issues? https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/21409 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/21409 If so, it seems like it got lost in our triage system, I've set appropriate labels so now it should get the appropriate visibility.
    • oh_boy 7y ago
      The one your referencing is related or the same issue. The very first mention of the problem I found with my initial search probably a year ago was the following issue from 2016, which is the one I'm watching: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/issues/1151 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/issues/1151
• deepakhj 7y ago
  Github Enterprise support has been awesome. We had an urgent issue and they helped resolve it within the hour.
• rossmohax 7y ago
  We are Gitlab customers since 2017 and I can tell you that your expectations for what support can do for you are very unrealistic. Per their own policy all they do is finding relevant tickets and send you there, from there on you are not their problem anymore. You as customers is also not a developer/product manager problem either, they do their planning and priotization using their own ideas and unless ticket is in the next milestone you won't even get response to your comments or suggestions for months. There is literally nobody, who has your interests as part of their day to day agenda. Except for sales at the time of your license renewal of course :) This time we are likely not going to renew and be switching to CE version after our current license expires.
  • gabeweaver 7y ago
    Hi. GitLab PM here. I'm really sorry that this is your experience. Can you point me to this policy? I would like to propose a change to it given that's not reflective of how most teams do planning and prioritization. We care very much about support issues, regularly prioritize a large portion of each release to addressing them, and can not do it effectively without ongoing involvement and feedback from the wider community. I will say that it is sometimes hard to separate the signal from the noise, given my team currently has 3k+ open issues. Please ping me (@gweaver) on issues that are relevant to you and I'll do my best to provide a status update / more information or bring in the relevant PM who can.
    • Aeolun 7y ago
      > I will say that it is sometimes hard to separate the signal from the noise, given my team currently has 3k+ open issues. I think this is a different problem. But not something your customers should have to care about.
      • skj 7y ago
        Even in business, empathy goes a long way.
        • 7y ago
• tima101 7y ago
  > Having better support and being more responsive to users. Those features may fade as GitLab gets bigger and gets more customers. Also being responsive to users may bloat product eventually. So it's not black and white situation.
• tomcam 7y ago
  I pay a princely $7 per month for GitHub and have always had surprisingly speedy, accurate, caring results-including follow ups.
• idlecool 7y ago
  I don't know of anyone who uses Gitlab. We use Github at work, and I know several people who use Github at work. In terms of features, I can't think of anything that Github doesn't support. If something is missing, you can always find tools/services that integrate with Github. That said, I am quite surprized that Gitlab is growing so fast. I would be curious to know what is the source of most of their revenue. Are they targeting a specific cohort of users, which Github is not able to?
  • frenchy 7y ago
    That's the problem with these monocultures. People just assume that "well, everyone uses it, so it must be the best/have all the features". As for what Gitlab has that Gitlab doesn't: * Built-in CI/CD that's actually pretty decent (easy to configure, you can restart subtasks, you can use your own runners) * An issue tracker that supports estimates & time tracking. There are "solutions" for github that work with external services, but they cost money, and have strange workflows. * The ability to self-host without huge piles of money. * A lot of features that I'm not currently interested in, but others would be, like k8s and serverless support.
    • Ayesh 7y ago
      One feature that probably doesn't get enough praise is the groups. You can create groups, and nested sub groups within. This helps us a lot to separate projects into smaller groups. Sub groups inherit access and keys from their parent and ancestors.
• OrgNet 7y ago
  > GitHub support is fucking horrible When did the support started being bad? (I never used their support)
• chinhodado 7y ago
  The few times I have contacted GitHub they have been stellar. Always replied very fast and generally quite helpful.
• feikname 7y ago
  I'm a non-paying user and for the few times I actually contacted GitHub they were always very helpful and fixed the bugs in less than 72 hours.
• Ayesh 7y ago
  To be fair, I find the GitHub documentation to be really well done, it shows links to relevant articles, and tend to give a clear picture.
• matthewcford 7y ago
  My experience is that yes new features might get released sooner, but bugs can linger unattended for years.