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I've been a CircleCI customer for 3 years. I'm interested in moving from Github to Gitlab, as I'm philosophically more aligned with Gitlab. I tried out CircleC

I've been a CircleCI customer for 3 years. I'm interested in moving from Github to Gitlab, as I'm philosophically more aligned with Gitlab. I tried out CircleCI's Gitlab integration a few weeks ago during the public beta, and it felt like CircleCI was really phoning it in. The instructions led me down paths where the product would just break. It told me to connect CircleCI to Gitlab through OAuth, and then my first build immediately died asking for a personal access token.[0] I generated a PAT instead, and then CircleCI failed my build because it was provisioning an empty SSH private key.[1] They had a channel for reporting bugs with the integration, but it doesn't create a real support ticket. Their feedback channel was just their public Canny feature request board. I submitted my feedback anyway, and they didn't respond for over two weeks, at which point the response was basically just, "Oh, we fixed a lot of bugs, so maybe we fixed yours. Can you delete everything and try again?" [0] https://twitter.com/deliberatecoder/status/1543063049598271488 https://twitter.com/deliberatecoder/status/15430630495982714... [1] https://circleci.canny.io/gitlab-vcs-experience-feedback/p/no-ssh-key https://circleci.canny.io/gitlab-vcs-experience-feedback/p/n...

candiddevmike 4y ago
What does it mean to be more philosophically aligned with one corporation vs another?
- CameronNemo 4y ago
  Maybe more philosophically aligned with the product, rather than the corporation behind it. Microsoft is slowly turning GitHub profiles into networking tools and the core SCM offering into a social media experience. GitLab is similar in some ways, but not quite as aggressive about it in my view.
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    Github has always had a social media aspect. Profiles, stars, feeds, followers have been there since early days. One of their tag lines was "social coding".
  - 999900000999 4y ago
    Whenever I want to view my private repos, I have to navigate a painful UI first. I'm given badges, and other gamification crap. Then again, when I publish my projects I tend to post them either here or on Reddit. Maybe Microsoft, with some justice, wants a cut of the traffic?
  - oxff 4y ago
    I was kind of against this, until I realized the reason I even began programming was purely out of social need (to make a program for me and my friend). I don't really mind it anymore.
- TAForObvReasons 4y ago
  GitLab offers a free and open source self-hosted "community edition" and understands it to be in their strategic interests to continue with the open source offering. GitHub does not offer it and does not appear to believe that an open source self-hosted offering is in their best interests. Supporting GitLab on those reasons alone, and choosing to pay for GitLab Enterprise Edition because they offer the Community Edition, is "philosophically aligned"
- djbusby 4y ago
  That the buyer believes in the same thing the company "believes" in. Eg: GitLab has an open-core product and GitHub is owned by (evil?) Microsoft.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Also the company is incredibly open, with lots of its documentation and meetings done in public and available on YouTube. Pretty interesting.
- mtlynch 4y ago
  I like many things Gitlab does: open-sources most of their product, publishes their documentation openly, promotes remote work. I strongly dislike some of the things that Github does: suck up open-source code and re-sell it through Copilot, stifle competition by offering free services that their non-MS-owned competitors can't afford to offer. I don't think either one is purely good or purely evil. Overall, I like both companies better than average, but I'd rather support Gitlab.
  - hawaiianbrah 4y ago
    GitHub also promotes remote work. Most of the company is remote and will always be remote.
    - mtlynch 4y ago
      That's fair, but I think Gitlab promotes it more strongly. They're 100% remote, and they publish guides teaching other companies how to replicate their remote-first setup: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/
      - inferiorhuman 4y ago
        I interviewed with Github recently (a pretty mediocre experience overall) and it seemed like they've fully committed to remote work. They don't even bother with on site onboarding anymore.
        hawaiianbrah 4y ago
        GitHub has been fully committed to remote work for years before the pandemic. I suspect they’ll bring back on site onboarding at some point, but maybe not. Sorry to hear your interview experience was mediocre. They’ve been tweaking it, and not for the better in my opinion.
      - soneca 4y ago
        Gitlab advocates for paying local salaries. That’s actually against my “philosophy“ as you put it, as it is against my direct interest, being a non-US based software developer. Their way to promote remote work is, ironically, hurtful to my prospects as a remote worker.
pojzon 4y ago
In case you consider Gitlab as an e2e solution or devops platform as a whole: Why would you need CircleCI? Gitlab can work as a full CICD platform.
- ollien 4y ago
  Can Gitlab CI use CircleCI workflows? There's less risk in just changing your VCS platform, rather than both your VCS and CI/CD at once, especially if you have to rewrite all your workflows. Obviously something like Dagger[1] solves this, but I don't know how widely used that is at this point. [1] https://dagger.io/ https://dagger.io/
- mtlynch 4y ago
  Yeah, I'd like to, but I found Gitlab's CI to be a substantial step down from Circle's CI product. I elaborated a bit more in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32242463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32242463
  - rmetzler 4y ago
    > But if I'm paying a company to manage CI, I don't want to provision my own hardware infrastructure If you provision your own gitlab-runner, you don’t pay gitlab anymore for runner minutes. You can also split workloads between runners through tags.

candiddevmike 4y ago

What does it mean to be more philosophically aligned with one corporation vs another?

CameronNemo 4y ago
Maybe more philosophically aligned with the product, rather than the corporation behind it. Microsoft is slowly turning GitHub profiles into networking tools and the core SCM offering into a social media experience. GitLab is similar in some ways, but not quite as aggressive about it in my view.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Github has always had a social media aspect. Profiles, stars, feeds, followers have been there since early days. One of their tag lines was "social coding".
- 999900000999 4y ago
  Whenever I want to view my private repos, I have to navigate a painful UI first. I'm given badges, and other gamification crap. Then again, when I publish my projects I tend to post them either here or on Reddit. Maybe Microsoft, with some justice, wants a cut of the traffic?
- oxff 4y ago
  I was kind of against this, until I realized the reason I even began programming was purely out of social need (to make a program for me and my friend). I don't really mind it anymore.
TAForObvReasons 4y ago
GitLab offers a free and open source self-hosted "community edition" and understands it to be in their strategic interests to continue with the open source offering. GitHub does not offer it and does not appear to believe that an open source self-hosted offering is in their best interests. Supporting GitLab on those reasons alone, and choosing to pay for GitLab Enterprise Edition because they offer the Community Edition, is "philosophically aligned"
djbusby 4y ago
That the buyer believes in the same thing the company "believes" in. Eg: GitLab has an open-core product and GitHub is owned by (evil?) Microsoft.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Also the company is incredibly open, with lots of its documentation and meetings done in public and available on YouTube. Pretty interesting.
mtlynch 4y ago
I like many things Gitlab does: open-sources most of their product, publishes their documentation openly, promotes remote work. I strongly dislike some of the things that Github does: suck up open-source code and re-sell it through Copilot, stifle competition by offering free services that their non-MS-owned competitors can't afford to offer. I don't think either one is purely good or purely evil. Overall, I like both companies better than average, but I'd rather support Gitlab.
- hawaiianbrah 4y ago
  GitHub also promotes remote work. Most of the company is remote and will always be remote.
  - mtlynch 4y ago
    That's fair, but I think Gitlab promotes it more strongly. They're 100% remote, and they publish guides teaching other companies how to replicate their remote-first setup: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/
    - inferiorhuman 4y ago
      I interviewed with Github recently (a pretty mediocre experience overall) and it seemed like they've fully committed to remote work. They don't even bother with on site onboarding anymore.
      - hawaiianbrah 4y ago
        GitHub has been fully committed to remote work for years before the pandemic. I suspect they’ll bring back on site onboarding at some point, but maybe not. Sorry to hear your interview experience was mediocre. They’ve been tweaking it, and not for the better in my opinion.
    - soneca 4y ago
      Gitlab advocates for paying local salaries. That’s actually against my “philosophy“ as you put it, as it is against my direct interest, being a non-US based software developer. Their way to promote remote work is, ironically, hurtful to my prospects as a remote worker.

pojzon 4y ago

In case you consider Gitlab as an e2e solution or devops platform as a whole: Why would you need CircleCI? Gitlab can work as a full CICD platform.

ollien 4y ago
Can Gitlab CI use CircleCI workflows? There's less risk in just changing your VCS platform, rather than both your VCS and CI/CD at once, especially if you have to rewrite all your workflows. Obviously something like Dagger[1] solves this, but I don't know how widely used that is at this point. [1] https://dagger.io/ https://dagger.io/
mtlynch 4y ago
Yeah, I'd like to, but I found Gitlab's CI to be a substantial step down from Circle's CI product. I elaborated a bit more in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32242463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32242463
- rmetzler 4y ago
  > But if I'm paying a company to manage CI, I don't want to provision my own hardware infrastructure If you provision your own gitlab-runner, you don’t pay gitlab anymore for runner minutes. You can also split workloads between runners through tags.