Innovative is a strong word, but they always had the best support for a variety of deployment archetypes, including baremetal, kubernetes, docker, docker+machin

Innovative is a strong word, but they always had the best support for a variety of deployment archetypes, including baremetal, kubernetes, docker, docker+machine (autoscales VMs in a public cloud to run many Docker executor runners.) They also had JWT authentication support built into GitLab before GitHub even had a CI offering at all. The GitLab kubernetes agent makes their CI/build tool more like a CD tool for organizations that primarily deploy to kubernetes clusters, which is fairly unique for a CI tool to act as a CD tool, though with scripts people often just make the CI tools do deployments anyway. My experience is limited to GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Jenkins. I've never been in an organization that managed to crack the code on running Jenkins in a sane way (always a poorly maintained, bloated mess of plugins, unfortunately) so I can't say I count Jenkins as a contender in this conversation. One could argue it's unfair to discount Jenkins because of organizations that manage it poorly, but there's something to be said about a tool that is so easy to accidentally run in an unmaintainable way. I also have some limited experience with Drone and Circle, but not enough to talk about them confidently.