13 ms·

It's kind of a poisoned well situation. Whoever would purchase them would lead to the departure of many disgruntled users who basically were with Gitlab to stic

• levidos 2y ago
  As DevOps engineer I've used and managed both Gitlab and Github extensively, and Gitlab is just so much better. Things make sense there. Shame that it's so darn expensive.
  • cortesoft 2y ago
    Agreed, used to manage our GitHub enterprise and then lead the transition to Gitlab enterprise. Both cheaper and better, and open source.
  • danpalmer 2y ago
    When you say managed, do you mean self hosting, or do you mean using the platforms for devops? I can see how GitHubs self hosting story might be worse, because it’s just not designed for that, most companies don’t do it anymore, and I believe the product is deprecated. As for doing devops from the platforms, I always found GitHub Actions better than GitLab CI, but I realise many feel the opposite.
  • silisili 2y ago
    Same. Been using Gitlab for years, but joined a new company using Github. I was appalled by how bad everything is compared to Gitlab, but especially ci/runners vs actions.
    • cyberpunk 2y ago
      Does gh actions even support k8s native runners yet?
      • Qerub 2y ago
        Looks like it: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/managing-self-hosted-runners-with-actions-runner-controller/about-actions-runner-controller https://docs.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/...
• danpalmer 2y ago
  > They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github. While I agree with most of your point, I'd suggest that being self-hosted is a fairly major draw for a certain group of people. There's a lot of overlap with the anti-MS cohort, but it's not exclusive. Most of the uses I've seen of GitLab in companies is those who stick it on a cheap VM and never pay for it. GitHub has had a self-hosted offering in the past, the current availability is... cloudy, looks discontinued, they're trying to move people back online. It was always way more expensive though, targeting a completely different market to GitLab self-hosting.
  • j16sdiz 2y ago
    GitHub enterprise server[1] still exists. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.10/admin/overview/about-github-enterprise-server https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.10/admin/over...
• fsckboy 2y ago
  > They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github so you use Github? if they're the same, why not use the alternative? I just don't understand your negativity given that you don't list any negatives
  • vlaaad 2y ago
    Not the parent, but I'll bite: they are not the same. GitHub offers significant advantages over Gitlab, while Gitlab doesn't. Therefore I use GitHub. Once upon a time Gitlab had an advantage: they allowed private repo hosting for free. Now it's gone.
• ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
  > I'd go with Drew's Sourcehut hub for the sake of actually shooting for something different. Or Codeforge (Forĝejo, if self hosting).
  • Banditoz 2y ago
    Gitea/Forgejo seem pretty snappy and lightweight (on the UI side at least. Reminds me of old GitHub before they went all in on clientside rendering)
    • ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
      It is, it's running fine as a mirror of my Codeberg and Github repos together with Postgres in a RISC-V Qemu VM running Debian, using less than 500MB.
• The_Colonel 2y ago
  Gitlab, GitHub and SourceHut are remotely comparable only if you care just about source code hosting. But Gitlab (and partially GitHub) is so much more - it grew to a beast trying to do everything for your project - project management, CI, analytics, communication... It's not for everyone, but for e.g. startups buying an all-in-one solution could be attractive to reduce the effort on getting all development tools set up and integrated.
  • krasin 2y ago
    SourceHut has an issue tracker (incomplete, but very fast) and CI. The problem is that SourceHut is not becoming any better over time. With all my respect to Drew, his attention is spread too thin over many projects.
    • rgreekguy 2y ago
      I remember reading SourceHut's creator, Drew, has some controversy around him...
      • krasin 2y ago
        Everyone doing anything has some controversy around them. At some point, we should just stop paying attention to internet dramas and focus on what matters. Like, fast issue trackers or continuous build with a novel feature to ssh into the state, when the build failed (which SourceHut supports: https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/build-ssh.md https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/build-ssh.md)
        • stavros 2y ago
          Gitlab does too, IIRC.
      • AceJohnny2 2y ago
        He is opinionated. Scroll through his blog, and I'm sure you'll find something to disagree on: https://drewdevault.com/ https://drewdevault.com/
• foooorsyth 2y ago
  >They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github. Gitlab had many features first. Namely, they had integrated CI way before GitHub did. Their open CI runners are really cool and easy to setup. GitHub had to scramble to put out their Actions product to compete. I don’t know what the feature comparison looks like today, but many of the innovative features you probably use on GitHub were on Gitlab first. They had a way more innovation velocity for quite a while.
• tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  [flagged]
• trustno2 2y ago
  gitlab is much more digestible for companies that want to self host. But at that point GitLab the company gets no money... no corp will use sourcehut. That's just outside of the possibility. And corps have the most money.
  • chrisandchris 2y ago
    Why does it get no money then? The pricing is the same.
  • preisschild 2y ago
    Gitlab Enterprise Edition can also be self hosted and they do take a lot of money for it :)
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• JoshTriplett 2y ago
  > I've also never felt compelled to use Gitlab. They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github. They have exactly three advantages over Github: 1) Ability to self-host. 2) Open Source core (if you carefully avoid all the proprietary features). 3) https://xkcd.com/918/ https://xkcd.com/918/
  • voidr 2y ago
    Sounds good on paper, but in reality you still need to pay the insane licensing fees if you need a usable product. It's like Android, I can download the source code and run it as long as I don't need extra features like a dialer and I don't mind majority of the Android apps not running on it. If you need a truly open source solution then that would be Gitea not GitLab.
    • Volundr 2y ago
      > Sounds good on paper, but in reality you still need to pay the insane licensing fees if you need a usable product. Can you clarify what you mean by this? I ran a hosted Gitlab instance for a previous company for years with SSO, actions, container registry, on Gitlab CE. I never felt like I was missing anything. While I'd definitely reach for Gitea if I wanted to be a purist about open source I honestly can't think of a Gitea feature that's not in Gitlab CE.
• chipdart 2y ago
  > I've also never felt compelled to use Gitlab. They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github. I completely disagree. GitLab undoubtedly has the best CICD service. GitHub Actions feel poorly designed and half-baked in comparison to the point they barely feel prod-ready. It's interesting to read into the thought process of anyone picking GitHub vs GitLab, because, other than being the default with tolerable shortcomings beyond copilot, there is no compelling reason to pick GitHub. If anything, GitLab's Achilles heel is it's massive Product Management problem. I recall that access to some features like Group Access Tokens were unexplainably removed from free access without updating documentation or even it's UI. Apparently some GitLab PM made a call to pull them out without bothering to check for the customer impact loose ends, and all loose ends were simply left in place for customers to repeatedly pester support without any action.
  • tempay 2y ago
    I use both extensively and lean towards to opposite statement, though not as strongly. GitHub Actions feels much more well thought out to me. The templating feels less hacky and the workflows via "uses" work really nicely for abstracting common bits of CI config into "packages". The downside is that GitLab CI feels easier to pick up and explain. On the opposite side, GitLab CI feels like it was made for containers and k8s whereas GitHub Actions feels like it's just a VM (even if the runner software is technically more flexible than that). From a management perspective GitLab is nicer but as a user I often want to avoid thinking about any of the k8s quirks and just have an emphemerial VM to play with.
• chrisandchris 2y ago
  > They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github. They literally offer self-hosting at the same price as the SaaS version, which is still significant to some of us. I'll go rather go back to paper than to just move every last bit of my companies data into the hands of a single company (looking at you, Microsoft).
  • chipdart 2y ago
    > I'll go rather go back to paper than to just move every last bit of my companies data into the hands of a single company (looking at you, Microsoft). To me, given he critical importance of a working CICD, it feels like Microsoft controlling both GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines poses a significant risk of having the proverbial rug pulled from under you. I don't expect Microsoft to invest on GitHub Actions enough to make them the clear winner in UX and cost, for example. Both Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions are appallingly bad in UX, at least compared to GitLab CICD or even CircleCI or Travis, and I don't expect to turn that around due to their incentives to not make either one too competitive regarding the other in-house service. But that's just me.
    • chrisandchris 2y ago
      I wholeheartly agree! The two best CI tools I've ever seen were Gitlab, as its approch was just working good (tm) and Teamcity, as its approach with the UI & Kotlin integration was just nice. Then I've seen Azure Pipelines, which seem like an unfinished product because it competes with Github Actions, and then there is Github Actions which seem to come from someonw who loves to write k8s yml files (they do what they do, but they're unreadable).
    • nox101 2y ago
      What makes Github Actions UX bad and what makes Gitlab CICD/CircleCI/Travis good? I've used 3 of those but I guess not enough to prefer one over another.
      • chrisandchris 2y ago
• metadat 2y ago
  I tried to register for sirhat today and was told I was flagged and should go through a manual process. Too bad, I like Drew and am benign (despite the skanky username). Username: sleaze / sleae
• p4bl0 2y ago
  > They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github. I can self-host the community edition for free, and in addition to use it as a software forge and static websites hosting and deployment platform through GitLab Pages, I can use it to manage my users and have third-party services (like mattermost, hedgedoc pads, and other internally developped apps) for centralized login. I really really hope that the buyer will keep the Community Edition alive, otherwise we'll have to move everything over to something else (I don't know what yet).
  • myworkinisgood 2y ago
    If you are using it for work, then it might be better to make everything paid. That would probably also reduce the cost per user, because we would have more users.
    • p4bl0 2y ago
      Per-user prices would be way to expensive. Thé self-hosted GitLab instance I manage is used for teaching and research. We don't use it to make money in any sort of way. We don't have the budget to pay for it. If we have to pay in the future we'll just (painfully) switch to another solution.
    • NewJazz 2y ago
      I'd still prefer self hosting CE, but this may be an option for you if it comes to it: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/join/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/join/
  • juliangmp 2y ago
    For self hosting I'd take a look at sourcehut or forgejo. They're fully open source instead of "open core". disclaimer: While I'm not directly involved with forgejo, I am part of Codeberg e.V., so consider that to be kind of an ad.
• wtcactus 2y ago
  They have a lot of advantages over GitHub as soon as you go beyond the simple task of hosting code and managing git workflow. The main one are CI/CD Pipelines fully baked in: This is huge. It's fully integrated in the platform. You have full visibility over the CI/CD pipeline. You can even use their own runners.
• OutOfHere 2y ago
  Bitbucket is alive and well, by the way, and should warrant consideration too.
  • keyle 2y ago
    I used it at work. It's just so damn slow and silly. But it does work and gets the job done.
• chillfox 2y ago
  Their self hosted offering was really good some time ago. I feel like the peak was just after they added CI. Then it got bloated. If you are trying to introduce source control to a traditional org that haven't been using it ever, then a self-hosted option with CI is a much easier sell than something in the cloud (in my experience).
• trueismywork 2y ago
  For any kind of usage that needs github enterprise server, gitlab is a more viable solution in future. Software development infrastructure is important enough and complex enough that a single closed source solution cannot solve all problems.
• globular-toast 2y ago
  Gitlab CI/CD is miles ahead of GitHub. GitHub is full of magic that you can't debug locally. Gitlab just makes sense and it's purely an orchestrator for stuff you can run locally.
  • sebazzz 2y ago
    > Gitlab just makes sense and it's purely an orchestrator for stuff you can run locally. The best CIs are exactly that. Just a task runner, with some reporting capability. Even the reporting capability Github is not very good at.
• hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
  > They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github. In most large orgs I worked for they used Gitlab as their main platform (even though they had uses for GitHub too) for the main reason: they could host it whenever they wanted it and how they wanted, as opposed to GitHub where the only thing you can control is runners.
• wdb 2y ago
  One reason to use Gitlab is there CI much more powerful than Github Actions. I am converting pipelines to Github Actions/workflows at the moment and some limitations are just a pain in the butt. Like 8 workflow depth etc
• nunez 2y ago
  Gitlab is EVERYWHERE in highly-regulated companies as it's the most enterprise-friendly self-hosted dev platform.