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It's definitely getting a lot more marketing heavy lately. Which is unfortunate in my opinion, because there's really not a lot of selling you need to do when p

It's definitely getting a lot more marketing heavy lately. Which is unfortunate in my opinion, because there's really not a lot of selling you need to do when people have actually used the product. You can also start to see more of the monetization strategies coming into play. More and more features are being added to the paid versions than core. This is also still fine with me, because the open core product is still so dang far ahead than the competition when it comes to total feature set, and I still feel like the way they stratify features makes sense. If you're not a big enterprise, most of the paid features aren't all that important to you yet. And I absolutely understand that as a company they want to make money, and grow. I love GitLab. I use it every day, and I tell other people and companies that they should use it. I will definitely say, however, that I'm counting these as orange-ish flags. Maybe not red, but also not green or yellow. I worry about whether the feature development will continue to be developer-oriented or if like Slack, it will shift to "whatever sells more licenses to large enterprise CEOs."

leipert 5y ago
> More and more features are being added to the paid versions than core. If you tally the features per release, still more features are being added to Core: https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/cs-tools/gitlab-cs-tools/what-is-new-since/?tab=stats https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/cs-tools/gitlab-cs-tools/what-i... (Disclaimer: GitLab employee and co-author of that overview)
indigochill 5y ago
Yeah, the excellent open core is the #1 reason I evangelize for Gitlab to colleagues as well. It's a guarantee that even if Gitlab turns fully user-hostile tomorrow (which I do not expect at all, but just saying, worst case), we can carry on unaffected on the self-hosted open core, which will doubtless be carried on by someone else in that eventuality. Plus, the scope of its features is incredible. My team uses the community edition and our peer teams use a different stack of three different licensed proprietary vendors just to do the same thing we're able to do on the open core. I had a funny conversation the other day where someone from those teams was looking at buying a license for a new package management system. When I pointed out Gitlab could do what he needed, he said, "Yeah, but we already have these other two vendors for source control and CI". To which I thought, "Sure, so you could drop both of them, too." But I can appreciate once a team's built momentum on one stack, interrupting that is probably usually more trouble than it's worth.
Lorin 5y ago
They provide additional features from the 'paid' tiers if you are hosting public groups/repositories - and open source projects can apply for additional freebies/discounting.

leipert 5y ago

> More and more features are being added to the paid versions than core. If you tally the features per release, still more features are being added to Core: https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/cs-tools/gitlab-cs-tools/what-is-new-since/?tab=stats https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/cs-tools/gitlab-cs-tools/what-i... (Disclaimer: GitLab employee and co-author of that overview)

indigochill 5y ago

Yeah, the excellent open core is the #1 reason I evangelize for Gitlab to colleagues as well. It's a guarantee that even if Gitlab turns fully user-hostile tomorrow (which I do not expect at all, but just saying, worst case), we can carry on unaffected on the self-hosted open core, which will doubtless be carried on by someone else in that eventuality. Plus, the scope of its features is incredible. My team uses the community edition and our peer teams use a different stack of three different licensed proprietary vendors just to do the same thing we're able to do on the open core. I had a funny conversation the other day where someone from those teams was looking at buying a license for a new package management system. When I pointed out Gitlab could do what he needed, he said, "Yeah, but we already have these other two vendors for source control and CI". To which I thought, "Sure, so you could drop both of them, too." But I can appreciate once a team's built momentum on one stack, interrupting that is probably usually more trouble than it's worth.

Lorin 5y ago

They provide additional features from the 'paid' tiers if you are hosting public groups/repositories - and open source projects can apply for additional freebies/discounting.