GitLab vs. Octopus Deploy

It is well-suited for any project that needs VCS. It's an excellent choice for teams that might be remote or have to collaborate across teams. Plenty of features allow for async working. With its dashboards and reporting features, it is also suitable for nontechnical PMs or stakeholders. It allows for very bespoke customization and can most often do much more than you need it to.

Incentivized

• The ability to manage different stages and define a workflow is very useful for ops troubleshooting as well as deployment. You can see which version each environment has for each project, and promote or redeploy versions.
• You can view deployment logs and dig deep into problems or long deployment steps.
• Finding old releases can be a pain, and there isn't a good way to compare releases.
• It does not really lend itself well to viewing what the content of a release is further than the version number. Ideally, you would be able to tie a deployment to the builds from the build server as well as specific commits from source control.

Incentivized

• GitLab excels in managing code versions, allowing easy tracking of changes, branch management, and merging contributions.
• It helps maintain code stability and reliability, saving time and effort in the development or research workflow.
• Powerful code review features, enabling collaboration and feedback among team members.
• Robust project management features, including issue tracking, kanban boards, and milestones.

Incentivized

• Many different platforms, languages, and operating systems are supported. You can deploy to your own server or the cloud. You can deploy to Windows, Linux, etc.
• Many different "step templates" are included, which make it very easy to deploy what you want, how you want. Such as deploying over SSH, FTP, etc.
• Support is very responsive and personable. You won't just be talking to a robot or a script. They will either solve your problem or understand it enough to solve it in a future release.
• Their documentation is well thought-out and very helpful. I have found very few missing pieces.

Incentivized

• CI variables management is sometimes hard to use, for example, with File type variables. The scope of each variable is also hard to guess.
• Access Token: there are too many types (Personal, Project, global..), and it is hard to identify the scope and where it comes from once created.
• Runners: auto-scaled runners are for the moment hard to put in place, and monitoring is not easy.

Incentivized

• Support for non-Microsoft applications needs to be improved to bring it on par with other comparable automation tools.
• It doesn't yet provide integration options with other IT management tools like JIRA and HP Support to implement continuous delivery and true DevOps processes.
• Support for AWS/Azure has been included very recently and it's not still very mature and feature rich and is expected to improve further in upcoming releases.

Incentivized

I really feel the platform has matured quite faster than others, and it is always at the top of its game compared to the different vendors like GitHub, Azure pipelines, CircleCI, Travis, Jenkins. Since it provides, agents, CI/CD, repository hosting, Secrets management, user management, and Single Sign on; among other features

Incentivized

Would be a 10 except for the retirement of the free Community Edition.

Incentivized

I find it easy to use, I haven't had to do the integration work, so that's why it is a 9/10, cause I can't speak to how easy that part was or the initial set up, but day to day use is great!

Incentivized

Some functionality feels slightly hidden in the menu system. For example: script modules are in the same menu as packages, where I feel that are not related entities. One is code for the deployment, the other is the thing that you are deploying...

Incentivized

I've never had experienced outages from GItlab itself, but regarding the code I have deployed to Gitlab, the history helps a lot to trace the cause of the issue or performing a rollback to go back to a working version

Incentivized

GItlab reponsiveness is amazing, has never left me IDLE. I've never had issues even with complex projects. I have not experienced any issues when integrating it with agents for example or SSO

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy is a software that runs very effectively, is easy to use, does not require such a high learning curve, provides the necessary tools to carry out the functions it offers, making it a very flexible software, it also allows that can be configured according to the needs of the user and provides integrations with other very advantageous tools since they are carried out in a very favorable way.

Incentivized

At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy support has always been there for us, even when using the free tier, we get responsive hands-on help. We haven't needed to use that level of support since the documentation is clearly written, and help is readily available within the interface itself. Using Octopus Deploy is a truly joyful experience.

Incentivized

GitHub is an inferior product from most points of view. We had to use it and the teams finds no positives about it. Everything is a downgrade from our previous GitLab solution. GitLab CI\CD is vastly superior to workflows, for example doing a manual node is just "when : manual" in GitLab while you have to do clickops in GitHub to achieve the same. No overview of code in branches is a minus when we tried to figure out what our colleagues are trying to merge as it looked off.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy was the obvious choice at the time, its strong .net support, robustness, ease of use, and integration into an existing process was a big plus. Also, Octopus Deploy was kind enough to give my organization a not for profit community licence. In addition, the product comes from a local Brisbane based company and it is always good to support local businesses when you can.

Incentivized

I think is very well designed, and like any VCS it works as intended

Incentivized

• GitLab cut down our spent on container, package and infrastructure registry
• Best thing is we can now have everything in single platform which cost effective too
• Quality of support is really good and they do have emergency support team as well which is great

Incentivized

• Any automated deployment process will save your company a ton of money on testing and bugs. When you don't automate your deployments, you can't be certain that what you are moving between environments is the exact same code with the same or appropriate configuration. What you tested might not be what got deployed.
• We've saved a lot of money using Octopus over the mostly manual process we were using before. We've removed a lot of the errors that come from manual, human intervention.
• Octopus has also allowed us to accomplish more with fewer people. It is easy to bring new people up to speed on the deployment process, and we can be confident of success after very little training.

Incentivized