5 ms·

We're using Azure DevOps at the bank I'm currently working at. I've been a long-time user of it actually, and am a big fan - I just don't see how GitLab's new p

We're using Azure DevOps at the bank I'm currently working at. I've been a long-time user of it actually, and am a big fan - I just don't see how GitLab's new pricing can compete with AzDo, or even GitHub. $49/user/m for Premium seems really expensive compared to AzDo and GitHub. Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition? $99/m for Ultimate eds? It doesn't even explain on the pricing page what you get for that, beyond a couple of bullet points of biz-speak - it's almost like they think anyone who buys that kind of language has more money than sense. Might have a point there to be fair, but still hard to see the point of Ultimate - would be really interested to hear if anyone here pays for it, and why?

theptip 6y ago
Ultimate includes a bunch of bells and whistles - full k8s integration, static/dynamic security testing, deep monitoring integration, etc. I have considered it but ultimately at any given time, there are one or two features in the top tier that sound good, but usually you can get 80% of the way there with a FOSS alternative. For example wiring up ArgoCD to run your k8s deploys, or writing your SAST rules yourself.
- acdha 6y ago
  Also it's all-or-nothing: the security tools are a good example where it could easily be worth paying a reasonable amount for either an optional feature or upgrades for specific users but when that applies a big up-front multiplier to your entire organization it becomes a much harder sale.
  - theptip 6y ago
    Agreed, this is the problem with Gitlab's bloat; the more features they add, the harder it is to justify a cheap price-point like the old $5/month -- and everybody's idea of what should go into the $20/month tier is going to be different. You can't disaggregate the offerings to pay for just the pieces you are interested in. If they are focusing more on the Enterprise side of things, I could see it being a good idea for them to split out the licensing and billing for different offerings; see Datadog for an example of the opposite extreme, where every service is optional, and you pay (handsomely) for whatever you use. If Gitlab split their offerings into a few packages, say $10/mo for k8s integration, $10/mo for security, $10/mo for the Jira replacement that I've never touched, and so on, they could potentially get more stickiness - users would be using the top-tier functionality for the modules that they care about, instead of missing a few killer features that are stashed away in the gold tier. I'm not paying $100/mo for a Gitlab seat, but I would have considered $20-30/mo extra for the k8s/prometheus CD integration without having to pay for all the rest of the top-tier features I'm not interested in. This might help Gitlab to focus a bit more, too, as they would be able to see exactly what product lines are bringing in the most revenue, and focus on making those better.
    - acdha 6y ago
      It's especially tricky with some competitors' choices: for example, Github's free dependency update service is a HUGE chunk of the day-to-day security value for most projects and there's not much room to say you can justify a double-digit dollars-per-user-per-month to get the other tools.
- harrisonjackson 6y ago
  They push features down to the lower tiers pretty frequently. Easier to launch them on ultimate and then move them down than the other way. Silver got a lot of great project management features around roadmapping and epics last year that allowed our team to cancel jira sub, so that was sweet. edit: wouldn't count on the fancier devops tools getting moved through :/
  - addicted 6y ago
    That's not reassuring in a comment on an update where they are completely eliminating a tier.
    - harrisonjackson 6y ago
      My response was to someone considering the ultimate tier. I'd recommend they keep an eye on the premium (silver) tier for the functionality they want which may at some point become available. Premium was an easy sell for us as we were able to eliminate other subscriptions. Ultimate does not have features we'd be willing to pay an extra $80 per user per month for.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  If you want your SAST tool to be worth a damn you need to write your own rules, at a minimum configure sources and sinks manually especially in an app that has a lot of dependencies. Last time I checked the security scanning tools that GitLab provides don’t really allow you to do that, SAST is expensive and also require manpower to manage well I guess if you only want to tick a box it might be worth it but I wouldn’t call the security features of GitLab worth the money you’re paying for especially with a large number of users.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> $49/user/m for Premium seems really expensive compared to AzDo and GitHub Sure, but you know what else $49/user/month for “Premium” is really expensive compared to? GitLab Premium, which is $19/user/month. [0] > Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition? At least some of the described features seem to be closer to GitHub Enterprise ($21/user/mo) or AzDo Basic+Test ($52/user/mo) than the lower tiers on those, but that's not consistent across the board and the three don't describe features in a way which makes side-by-side comparison easy. But I don't see Premium as clearly overpriced compared to the competition. > $99/m for Ultimate eds? It doesn’t even explain on the pricing page what you get for that, beyond a couple of bullet points of biz-speak There’s a detailed feature breakdown of all three plans on the pricing page, with links to more details about each feature. Unfortunately, its in a stupid scrolling table that only lets you see a few lines at a time, though. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
- mpreuss 6y ago
  Thanks for catching that usability issue, we agree the double scrolling is not ideal. This wasn't the intended functionality and I can't imagine how long it would have taken for us to catch this. Here's the link to the MR https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_requests/73012 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request... we'll have a fix going live shortly
- ninju 6y ago
  If you click the "View More" option at the bottom the scroll region expands to fill the view...but still a confusing UI
zedpm 6y ago
> $49/user/m... The premium tier is $19/user/m, not $49. Still, I agree that even $19 is high relative to the competition. We're currently on the (soon to disappear) $4/user/m Gitlab plan and now I'm wasting time trying to figure out if we'll lose anything we care about by dropping down to the free tier.
- GordonS 6y ago
  Sorry, $49 was just a typo.
deeviant 6y ago
They offer tons of benefits for Ultimate edition. How could you possibly run a business without "Executive level insights"?
- GordonS 6y ago
  Yep, that's exactly the kind of language I'm talking about - wtf does that even mean?
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    It means a few fancy dashboards with some marginally useful graphs. I’m sure that the executives may be happy with it, but I personally found it a bit of a letdown.
  - TavsiE9s 6y ago
    We recently downgraded from Ultimate to Premium exactly because of that: it was not providing us with clear benefits.
GordonS 6y ago
Whoops, $49 was a typo - I meant $19 of course (can no longer edit my comment).
curryst 6y ago
> $99/m for Ultimate eds? There's a single bullet in that table that makes it all make sense: > Free Guest users Guest users can: * Create issues * Leave comments * Clone or download the project source That sounds like it covers the use case for a substantial portion of people who currently have paid accounts. So Basic -> Bronze -> Silver pricing pays for the increase in features. Ultimate/Gold/whatever includes price increases for features, as well as not having to pay for accounts for people who don't really use GitLab much at all. I strongly suspect the Ultimate tier is geared towards large companies who's primary line of business is not technology. They have a lot of people who need minimal access to GitLab, and a small number of people who need to access GitLab a lot. It wouldn't be super surprising to me if the difference in cost between Silver and Gold is minimal for someone like Walmart or P&G because they can stop paying for accounts for PMs, helpdesk workers, the people that actually use the software, etc. It's probably not really of much interest to a tech company because so many people need access to GitLab that you get very little gain from free Guests.
addicted 6y ago
Azure Devops is such a good product. I’m really surprised it doesn’t get more love to be honest. And the CLI is fully featured and well supported, and makes automating stuff, and building your own UIs ridiculously simple.
- easton 6y ago
  Because Microsoft isn’t signing big clients on to it anymore, as they are slowly trying to transition (it’s very early days still) to GitHub Enterprise. They probably won’t talk much about it until the missing features are replicated, but it’s coming. (Based on anecdotes on previous threads about Azure DevOps, and the fact that GitHub is a bit more user friendly).
  - Dayshine 6y ago
    Which is such a shame, because Azure DevOps is honestly better (apart from the CI system).
    - GordonS 6y ago
      What don't you like about AzDo's CI system?
      - Dayshine 6y ago
        While technically you can do anything, there's no community discovery of CI scripts like with GitHub. Afaik there isn't a Checks API equivalent, or it's not uses by the limited range of built-in CI functions. And finally, the caching is terribly slow. It's faster to reinstall packages than to cache them, meaning you can't run a build in less than 3/4 minutes.

theptip 6y ago

Ultimate includes a bunch of bells and whistles - full k8s integration, static/dynamic security testing, deep monitoring integration, etc. I have considered it but ultimately at any given time, there are one or two features in the top tier that sound good, but usually you can get 80% of the way there with a FOSS alternative. For example wiring up ArgoCD to run your k8s deploys, or writing your SAST rules yourself.

acdha 6y ago
Also it's all-or-nothing: the security tools are a good example where it could easily be worth paying a reasonable amount for either an optional feature or upgrades for specific users but when that applies a big up-front multiplier to your entire organization it becomes a much harder sale.
- theptip 6y ago
  Agreed, this is the problem with Gitlab's bloat; the more features they add, the harder it is to justify a cheap price-point like the old $5/month -- and everybody's idea of what should go into the $20/month tier is going to be different. You can't disaggregate the offerings to pay for just the pieces you are interested in. If they are focusing more on the Enterprise side of things, I could see it being a good idea for them to split out the licensing and billing for different offerings; see Datadog for an example of the opposite extreme, where every service is optional, and you pay (handsomely) for whatever you use. If Gitlab split their offerings into a few packages, say $10/mo for k8s integration, $10/mo for security, $10/mo for the Jira replacement that I've never touched, and so on, they could potentially get more stickiness - users would be using the top-tier functionality for the modules that they care about, instead of missing a few killer features that are stashed away in the gold tier. I'm not paying $100/mo for a Gitlab seat, but I would have considered $20-30/mo extra for the k8s/prometheus CD integration without having to pay for all the rest of the top-tier features I'm not interested in. This might help Gitlab to focus a bit more, too, as they would be able to see exactly what product lines are bringing in the most revenue, and focus on making those better.
  - acdha 6y ago
    It's especially tricky with some competitors' choices: for example, Github's free dependency update service is a HUGE chunk of the day-to-day security value for most projects and there's not much room to say you can justify a double-digit dollars-per-user-per-month to get the other tools.
harrisonjackson 6y ago
They push features down to the lower tiers pretty frequently. Easier to launch them on ultimate and then move them down than the other way. Silver got a lot of great project management features around roadmapping and epics last year that allowed our team to cancel jira sub, so that was sweet. edit: wouldn't count on the fancier devops tools getting moved through :/
- addicted 6y ago
  That's not reassuring in a comment on an update where they are completely eliminating a tier.
  - harrisonjackson 6y ago
    My response was to someone considering the ultimate tier. I'd recommend they keep an eye on the premium (silver) tier for the functionality they want which may at some point become available. Premium was an easy sell for us as we were able to eliminate other subscriptions. Ultimate does not have features we'd be willing to pay an extra $80 per user per month for.
dogma1138 6y ago
If you want your SAST tool to be worth a damn you need to write your own rules, at a minimum configure sources and sinks manually especially in an app that has a lot of dependencies. Last time I checked the security scanning tools that GitLab provides don’t really allow you to do that, SAST is expensive and also require manpower to manage well I guess if you only want to tick a box it might be worth it but I wouldn’t call the security features of GitLab worth the money you’re paying for especially with a large number of users.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> $49/user/m for Premium seems really expensive compared to AzDo and GitHub Sure, but you know what else $49/user/month for “Premium” is really expensive compared to? GitLab Premium, which is $19/user/month. [0] > Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition? At least some of the described features seem to be closer to GitHub Enterprise ($21/user/mo) or AzDo Basic+Test ($52/user/mo) than the lower tiers on those, but that's not consistent across the board and the three don't describe features in a way which makes side-by-side comparison easy. But I don't see Premium as clearly overpriced compared to the competition. > $99/m for Ultimate eds? It doesn’t even explain on the pricing page what you get for that, beyond a couple of bullet points of biz-speak There’s a detailed feature breakdown of all three plans on the pricing page, with links to more details about each feature. Unfortunately, its in a stupid scrolling table that only lets you see a few lines at a time, though. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/

mpreuss 6y ago
Thanks for catching that usability issue, we agree the double scrolling is not ideal. This wasn't the intended functionality and I can't imagine how long it would have taken for us to catch this. Here's the link to the MR https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_requests/73012 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request... we'll have a fix going live shortly
ninju 6y ago
If you click the "View More" option at the bottom the scroll region expands to fill the view...but still a confusing UI

zedpm 6y ago

> $49/user/m... The premium tier is $19/user/m, not $49. Still, I agree that even $19 is high relative to the competition. We're currently on the (soon to disappear) $4/user/m Gitlab plan and now I'm wasting time trying to figure out if we'll lose anything we care about by dropping down to the free tier.

GordonS 6y ago
Sorry, $49 was just a typo.

deeviant 6y ago

They offer tons of benefits for Ultimate edition. How could you possibly run a business without "Executive level insights"?

GordonS 6y ago
Yep, that's exactly the kind of language I'm talking about - wtf does that even mean?
- Aeolun 6y ago
  It means a few fancy dashboards with some marginally useful graphs. I’m sure that the executives may be happy with it, but I personally found it a bit of a letdown.
- TavsiE9s 6y ago
  We recently downgraded from Ultimate to Premium exactly because of that: it was not providing us with clear benefits.

GordonS 6y ago

Whoops, $49 was a typo - I meant $19 of course (can no longer edit my comment).

curryst 6y ago

> $99/m for Ultimate eds? There's a single bullet in that table that makes it all make sense: > Free Guest users Guest users can: * Create issues * Leave comments * Clone or download the project source That sounds like it covers the use case for a substantial portion of people who currently have paid accounts. So Basic -> Bronze -> Silver pricing pays for the increase in features. Ultimate/Gold/whatever includes price increases for features, as well as not having to pay for accounts for people who don't really use GitLab much at all. I strongly suspect the Ultimate tier is geared towards large companies who's primary line of business is not technology. They have a lot of people who need minimal access to GitLab, and a small number of people who need to access GitLab a lot. It wouldn't be super surprising to me if the difference in cost between Silver and Gold is minimal for someone like Walmart or P&G because they can stop paying for accounts for PMs, helpdesk workers, the people that actually use the software, etc. It's probably not really of much interest to a tech company because so many people need access to GitLab that you get very little gain from free Guests.

addicted 6y ago

Azure Devops is such a good product. I’m really surprised it doesn’t get more love to be honest. And the CLI is fully featured and well supported, and makes automating stuff, and building your own UIs ridiculously simple.

easton 6y ago
Because Microsoft isn’t signing big clients on to it anymore, as they are slowly trying to transition (it’s very early days still) to GitHub Enterprise. They probably won’t talk much about it until the missing features are replicated, but it’s coming. (Based on anecdotes on previous threads about Azure DevOps, and the fact that GitHub is a bit more user friendly).
- Dayshine 6y ago
  Which is such a shame, because Azure DevOps is honestly better (apart from the CI system).
  - GordonS 6y ago
    What don't you like about AzDo's CI system?
    - Dayshine 6y ago
      While technically you can do anything, there's no community discovery of CI scripts like with GitHub. Afaik there isn't a Checks API equivalent, or it's not uses by the limited range of built-in CI functions. And finally, the caching is terribly slow. It's faster to reinstall packages than to cache them, meaning you can't run a build in less than 3/4 minutes.