8 ms·

Gitlab pricing used to be something like $4/mo and they saw incredible growth. They raised their rates to $19/mo and now are seeing slow growth. In April they a

Gitlab pricing used to be something like $4/mo and they saw incredible growth. They raised their rates to $19/mo and now are seeing slow growth. In April they are raising to $29/mo- not sure what they think is going to happen. Also, for anyone that actively watches, they have to wonder if there will be another price hike once you are on their platform. Github Enterprise is only $21/mo and for most users it has all the same features of Gitlab. Gitlab's main differentiator for a long time was CI, but now Github has its own equivalent (Actions). It seems that Gitlab is only going to be left with 1) existing Gitlab users 2) users that want some enterprise feature set that doesn't exist on Github, and want it in a single platform without a third party

chainwax 4y ago
Unless Actions has gotten a lot more fleshed out since I last used it, I don't think it's as robust as Gitlab CI.
- stabbles 4y ago
  - Github Action's design is much better, just look at [1] for example, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in Gitlab that's not done for some reason - I've had tons of issues with their kubernetes runners, hard to debug spurious system failures - They still don't display the last N bytes of the logs when logs get long, just the first N bytes, which is entirely useless when a build fails - It's awfully slow to navigate through pipelines, in particular child pipelines - The `stages` things is just useless noise, I just wanna specify dependencies please, I don't want to be forced to also put each job in a stage, it's weird. - You can't expose a secret only to a single job step; they don't really have finer granularity for job steps like Github Actions has -- they just generate a script.sh that's executed directly. - Github has many more reusable actions from the community, I don't think Gitlab has that at all? At least not in a convenient way. [1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/395964 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/395964
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    > Github has many more reusable actions from the community, I don't think Gitlab has that at all? At least not in a convenient way. This is the big one. Github’s ability and dominance in the social space means they have the most active actions ecosystems. They made actions easier to import share and built marketplaces and now gobs of developers build value into it just for clout (and because they enjoy software of course). If you think about it carefully, it’s actually a security nightmare. You have no idea what a random Github action you “uses:”d is doing, but in practice 90%+ of the time it doesn’t matter, you get good functionality and save time for free.
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
      YES! We are getting awfully tempted to move at least my AI team to Github. We don't want to dedicate someone to figure out CI/CD/MLops pipelines, which would mostly amount to translating existing, published, official github action pipelines to something that can work on Gitlab. Our devops teams can help, but when in our case we need a pretty domain specific pipeline setup. Most of the pipeline related docs for Azure ML, for example, is based around very extensive github actions templates. It would take minutes to just deploy it there. I mean in this particular case, it's unfair since microsoft would obviously favor github. But it's not like there's a marketplace where a community made version could be used as a replacement...
  - jamesfinlayson 4y ago
    > The `stages` things is just useless noise, I just wanna specify dependencies please, I don't want to be forced to also put each job in a stage, it's weird. I think there a few things like this in GitLab (like the ability to run pipelines against both commits and pull requests) - GitLab give you a lot of flexibility... but so far it's all just been extra bother to deal with.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    Oh my god their kubernetes runners are a nightmare sometimes. Even the configuration is arcane and the parameters can overlap, or not. It's crazy.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I used to think this, but after having gotten used to Github Actions I’m moving everything over. Ultimately I constantly felt like everything was half baked when using Gitlab. I still kind of feel that way with Github, but to a much lesser extend. More importantly, they allow me to pay my $21/month monthly which means they get my business instead of ‘only pay per year’ Gitlab.
- paulddraper 4y ago
  GitHub actions are great. Gitlab CI is a bunch of weird hard to understand bolt on conf, undergirded by a defunct docker-machine project I tried debugging some problems I was having with a runners. Turns out the default Ubuntu AMI was like 6 years old. Does anyone use this thing?
- prepend 4y ago
  I disagree. Actions is really nice and I don’t have to set up and debug runners. In GitHub, I can have dedicated runners if I want, but99% of the time, I just use vanilla Ubuntu runners. My fear though is that GitHub will Jack up their prices once I’m running everything. Right now they give 50k minutes per month, but that could change at any point. GitHub enterprise started out at $8/month and now it’s $20+.
deleted 4y ago
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megous 4y ago
At $29 * 7 * 12 per year it became way cheaper for us to just piece together functionality we needed from nginx+cgit+homegrown database to store users/repos/acl/push info and a few git hooks written in a few lines of PHP. The cost is now independent of the number of developers using the system. So far it did cost ~1 month of paying for github in dev time and I can't imagine it costing much more when we'll want to add some automation on top of the list of accepted pushes/ref updates, for which we did not have a need for so far. Certainly beats installing 1GiB debian package of selfhosted gitlab and having to figure out why some stupid ruby service is eating increasing amounts of hundreds of MiB of RAM on an empty gitlab instance while doing nothing at all. That's $2.5k/yr that can be put into something else. When developers do operations... I guess. :D
- conanbatt 4y ago
  2.5k doesn't pay 1 day of a developer in a top-of-market startup.
  - ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago
    I need to up my rate :D
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- kiratp 4y ago
  A developer costs about 250K a year all up. That doesn’t include opportunity cost. 49, 40 hour weeks a year = $127.55 an hour. 29* 7 * 12 / (127.55) = 19.09 hours If it takes you more than 2.3 dev days (100% productive) you’re negative ROI doing it yourself. This math doesn’t even factor in the opportunity cost of doing this.
  - zeusk 4y ago
    Their solution is not a monthly recurring event.
memco 4y ago
> Github Enterprise is only $21/mo and for most users it has all the same features of Gitlab. Of those things that I like more in Gitlab, it is deploy tokens: an easy way to be able to dole out permission to clone code where needed without having to bother with key management or user management. As far as I can tell GitHub has something like this but it requires setting up an app to talk to the API and isn’t nearly simple as the button available in Gitlab.
- brasic 4y ago
  Not sure what you mean. Adding a deploy key is about as simple as I can imagine, definitely doesn’t require messing with apps, which I agree is a pain. https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-github-with-ssh/managing-deploy-keys#deploy-keys https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-gith... (disclosure, former GH)
  - mau 4y ago
    I think the GH app is a workaround for this: > Deploy keys only grant access to a single repository. More complex projects may have many repositories to pull to the same server.
  - memco 4y ago
    That's a different thing. Here's some info on deploy tokens: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/deploy_tokens/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/deploy_tokens/. It's a one-off username+password pair that can be used for HTTP cloning without setting up SSH keys or creating users. As far as I can tell in Github you use either automatic tokens[1] or personal tokens[2]. Personal tokens look easier to set up, but they are tied to a user and not the repo or organization, which isn't great if you're using this for a company—you have to create a whole separate token user if you don't want it tied to someone's personal account. Automatic tokens require a script to manage. As nice as this one feature of Gitlab is it is not a major show-stopper. Almost everything we need is available in most git services. So to GGP's point: we are likely to go for the most affordable option even if there's some tradeoffs. [1]: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/security-guides/automatic-token-authentication https://docs.github.com/en/actions/security-guides/automatic... [2]: https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-account-and-data-secure/creating-a-personal-access-token https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-accou...
HWR_14 4y ago
Or (3) Gitlab users that want to self-host. But while those might be users, they are not great customers.
brightball 4y ago
$29 / month as it relates to developer salaries is not impactful.
- speedgoose 4y ago
  It adds up. 29$ for GitHub, 19$ for GitHub Copilot, 20$ for ChatGPT Plus, a few codespaces and runners, perhaps 7.5$ for the sadomasochist project managers who wants Jira, and you may get a nice bill at the end of the month. And then you have people like GitKrakken who ask 19$ for a git client, or Teleport who ask 36$ for a ssh client.
  - brightball 4y ago
    It does, but you have to associate these cost as part of the employee expense and not a separate budget line item. An extra $100 / month for tools needed by somebody being paid $5,000+ / month is nothing.
- msm_ 4y ago
  In my previous organisation $19/month (IIRC) was a dealbreaker. That was non-US so salaries are lower, and suddenly I had to explain why we absolutely needed the paid version so much (instead of sticking to the free one). To make it worse, most of the people that had access to gitlab were researchers/managers/non-technical people and not actually developers, so only a few people would benefit from the paid version. So we never bought the paid version.
mschuster91 4y ago
> It seems that Gitlab is only going to be left with 1) existing Gitlab users 2) users that want some enterprise feature set that doesn't exist on Github, and want it in a single platform without a third party Add in 3) people who want a reasonable option to self-host that's not charging you to oblivion.
suddenclarity 4y ago
I reckon their growth was mostly killed by Microsoft purchasing GitHub and making private repositories free. Most of the open source community seem to be on GitHub anyway so it just removed any incitament for average people to join Gitlab. Once you're invested in one environment it takes something special to move.
- nicolaslem 4y ago
  This. A while ago Gitlab was really the better option: mostly free and more features (CI, project management...). Github caught up on features and price so why bother going against the network effect when the alternative is not even better?
nunez 4y ago
GitLab Auto DevOps and (now) GitLab Ultimate are definitely compelling differentiators that Github doesn't currently have, but I can't see Github just _not_ responding to that in a big way.

chainwax 4y ago

Unless Actions has gotten a lot more fleshed out since I last used it, I don't think it's as robust as Gitlab CI.

stabbles 4y ago
- Github Action's design is much better, just look at [1] for example, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in Gitlab that's not done for some reason - I've had tons of issues with their kubernetes runners, hard to debug spurious system failures - They still don't display the last N bytes of the logs when logs get long, just the first N bytes, which is entirely useless when a build fails - It's awfully slow to navigate through pipelines, in particular child pipelines - The `stages` things is just useless noise, I just wanna specify dependencies please, I don't want to be forced to also put each job in a stage, it's weird. - You can't expose a secret only to a single job step; they don't really have finer granularity for job steps like Github Actions has -- they just generate a script.sh that's executed directly. - Github has many more reusable actions from the community, I don't think Gitlab has that at all? At least not in a convenient way. [1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/395964 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/395964
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  > Github has many more reusable actions from the community, I don't think Gitlab has that at all? At least not in a convenient way. This is the big one. Github’s ability and dominance in the social space means they have the most active actions ecosystems. They made actions easier to import share and built marketplaces and now gobs of developers build value into it just for clout (and because they enjoy software of course). If you think about it carefully, it’s actually a security nightmare. You have no idea what a random Github action you “uses:”d is doing, but in practice 90%+ of the time it doesn’t matter, you get good functionality and save time for free.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    YES! We are getting awfully tempted to move at least my AI team to Github. We don't want to dedicate someone to figure out CI/CD/MLops pipelines, which would mostly amount to translating existing, published, official github action pipelines to something that can work on Gitlab. Our devops teams can help, but when in our case we need a pretty domain specific pipeline setup. Most of the pipeline related docs for Azure ML, for example, is based around very extensive github actions templates. It would take minutes to just deploy it there. I mean in this particular case, it's unfair since microsoft would obviously favor github. But it's not like there's a marketplace where a community made version could be used as a replacement...
- jamesfinlayson 4y ago
  > The `stages` things is just useless noise, I just wanna specify dependencies please, I don't want to be forced to also put each job in a stage, it's weird. I think there a few things like this in GitLab (like the ability to run pipelines against both commits and pull requests) - GitLab give you a lot of flexibility... but so far it's all just been extra bother to deal with.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  Oh my god their kubernetes runners are a nightmare sometimes. Even the configuration is arcane and the parameters can overlap, or not. It's crazy.
Aeolun 4y ago
I used to think this, but after having gotten used to Github Actions I’m moving everything over. Ultimately I constantly felt like everything was half baked when using Gitlab. I still kind of feel that way with Github, but to a much lesser extend. More importantly, they allow me to pay my $21/month monthly which means they get my business instead of ‘only pay per year’ Gitlab.
paulddraper 4y ago
GitHub actions are great. Gitlab CI is a bunch of weird hard to understand bolt on conf, undergirded by a defunct docker-machine project I tried debugging some problems I was having with a runners. Turns out the default Ubuntu AMI was like 6 years old. Does anyone use this thing?
prepend 4y ago
I disagree. Actions is really nice and I don’t have to set up and debug runners. In GitHub, I can have dedicated runners if I want, but99% of the time, I just use vanilla Ubuntu runners. My fear though is that GitHub will Jack up their prices once I’m running everything. Right now they give 50k minutes per month, but that could change at any point. GitHub enterprise started out at $8/month and now it’s $20+.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

megous 4y ago

At $29 * 7 * 12 per year it became way cheaper for us to just piece together functionality we needed from nginx+cgit+homegrown database to store users/repos/acl/push info and a few git hooks written in a few lines of PHP. The cost is now independent of the number of developers using the system. So far it did cost ~1 month of paying for github in dev time and I can't imagine it costing much more when we'll want to add some automation on top of the list of accepted pushes/ref updates, for which we did not have a need for so far. Certainly beats installing 1GiB debian package of selfhosted gitlab and having to figure out why some stupid ruby service is eating increasing amounts of hundreds of MiB of RAM on an empty gitlab instance while doing nothing at all. That's $2.5k/yr that can be put into something else. When developers do operations... I guess. :D

conanbatt 4y ago
2.5k doesn't pay 1 day of a developer in a top-of-market startup.
- ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago
  I need to up my rate :D
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
kiratp 4y ago
A developer costs about 250K a year all up. That doesn’t include opportunity cost. 49, 40 hour weeks a year = $127.55 an hour. 29* 7 * 12 / (127.55) = 19.09 hours If it takes you more than 2.3 dev days (100% productive) you’re negative ROI doing it yourself. This math doesn’t even factor in the opportunity cost of doing this.
- zeusk 4y ago
  Their solution is not a monthly recurring event.

memco 4y ago

> Github Enterprise is only $21/mo and for most users it has all the same features of Gitlab. Of those things that I like more in Gitlab, it is deploy tokens: an easy way to be able to dole out permission to clone code where needed without having to bother with key management or user management. As far as I can tell GitHub has something like this but it requires setting up an app to talk to the API and isn’t nearly simple as the button available in Gitlab.

brasic 4y ago
Not sure what you mean. Adding a deploy key is about as simple as I can imagine, definitely doesn’t require messing with apps, which I agree is a pain. https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-github-with-ssh/managing-deploy-keys#deploy-keys https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-gith... (disclosure, former GH)
- mau 4y ago
  I think the GH app is a workaround for this: > Deploy keys only grant access to a single repository. More complex projects may have many repositories to pull to the same server.
- memco 4y ago
  That's a different thing. Here's some info on deploy tokens: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/deploy_tokens/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/deploy_tokens/. It's a one-off username+password pair that can be used for HTTP cloning without setting up SSH keys or creating users. As far as I can tell in Github you use either automatic tokens[1] or personal tokens[2]. Personal tokens look easier to set up, but they are tied to a user and not the repo or organization, which isn't great if you're using this for a company—you have to create a whole separate token user if you don't want it tied to someone's personal account. Automatic tokens require a script to manage. As nice as this one feature of Gitlab is it is not a major show-stopper. Almost everything we need is available in most git services. So to GGP's point: we are likely to go for the most affordable option even if there's some tradeoffs. [1]: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/security-guides/automatic-token-authentication https://docs.github.com/en/actions/security-guides/automatic... [2]: https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-account-and-data-secure/creating-a-personal-access-token https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-accou...

HWR_14 4y ago

Or (3) Gitlab users that want to self-host. But while those might be users, they are not great customers.

brightball 4y ago

$29 / month as it relates to developer salaries is not impactful.

speedgoose 4y ago
It adds up. 29$ for GitHub, 19$ for GitHub Copilot, 20$ for ChatGPT Plus, a few codespaces and runners, perhaps 7.5$ for the sadomasochist project managers who wants Jira, and you may get a nice bill at the end of the month. And then you have people like GitKrakken who ask 19$ for a git client, or Teleport who ask 36$ for a ssh client.
- brightball 4y ago
  It does, but you have to associate these cost as part of the employee expense and not a separate budget line item. An extra $100 / month for tools needed by somebody being paid $5,000+ / month is nothing.
msm_ 4y ago
In my previous organisation $19/month (IIRC) was a dealbreaker. That was non-US so salaries are lower, and suddenly I had to explain why we absolutely needed the paid version so much (instead of sticking to the free one). To make it worse, most of the people that had access to gitlab were researchers/managers/non-technical people and not actually developers, so only a few people would benefit from the paid version. So we never bought the paid version.

mschuster91 4y ago

> It seems that Gitlab is only going to be left with 1) existing Gitlab users 2) users that want some enterprise feature set that doesn't exist on Github, and want it in a single platform without a third party Add in 3) people who want a reasonable option to self-host that's not charging you to oblivion.

suddenclarity 4y ago

I reckon their growth was mostly killed by Microsoft purchasing GitHub and making private repositories free. Most of the open source community seem to be on GitHub anyway so it just removed any incitament for average people to join Gitlab. Once you're invested in one environment it takes something special to move.

nicolaslem 4y ago
This. A while ago Gitlab was really the better option: mostly free and more features (CI, project management...). Github caught up on features and price so why bother going against the network effect when the alternative is not even better?

nunez 4y ago

GitLab Auto DevOps and (now) GitLab Ultimate are definitely compelling differentiators that Github doesn't currently have, but I can't see Github just _not_ responding to that in a big way.