GitLab Reviews & Insights

Score8.7 out of 10

400 Reviews and Ratings

GitLab

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for GitLab are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Cloud-Based UI and Git Integration: Users have praised the cloud-based UI of GitLab for supporting Git version control, allowing local checkout, and enabling multiple developers to work simultaneously in one file. The reduction of code conflicts and enhanced collaboration are highlighted benefits of this feature.

Integration Features: Reviewers highly value the integration of GitLab with version control, code review, and project management features. They find it easy to configure GitLab runners for running tests and defining permissions using Terraform, which streamlines their development processes effectively.

CI/CD Capabilities: Users find the CI/CD pipelines, merge requests, and open-source nature of GitLab beneficial for their development workflows. They appreciate the platform's integrations with other tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, and Toad. Additionally, they praise its security features for ensuring a safe software deployment environment.

GitLab Reviews

48 Reviews

Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees)

A very valuable, Cost effective and Performance booster platform

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

October 3, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My organization is using git for the source code management like pull, push, merge request and changes history. We are also using GitLab to track the issues and resolutions. Its also provide some linking with the other issues tracking tools like MantisBt, Jira, Trello etc. It has options to connect with jenkin and other build creation tools, That helps allot at the time of QA and UAT.

Pros

Source code management
Issues tracking and linking with commits
Intigration with build creation tools and deveopes
Proper documentation of the features and operations

Cons

Some time its taking time in loading
Can improve the UI part
Graph view of commits is littlebit confusing in case of number of branches, It can be little bit improve

Likelihood to Recommend

If some one wants to work with a very high quality and relible platform then they should use GitLab, It can auto merge the source codes without any harmfull action. All the codes and condition will be there. Its very helpfull in case of morethen one developer in a team and all are working on the same file or project.

Alternatives

GitHub and Bitbucket

When i was using the other platform, Some time i face down time, But GitLabs its not happening for single time. GitLab is having easy user interference as compared to other platforms. Pull Request, Code review, Issue tracking, Merging, Access control and User Roles is having a very clean and relative user interference.

Pankaj Choudhary

Freelancer Android Developer in Engineering at Freelancer (Information Technology & Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

GitLab for president

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

September 30, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use GitLab to manage our source control and visualize our branches , resolved merges/conflicts , and conduct code reviews. In these functions we find that GitLab provides a robust way to view and manage.

Pros

Visibility
Control
Ease of use

Cons

Merge differences can be confusing
The ui can be a little clunky
Large files tend to take a long time

Likelihood to Recommend

Gitlab has been useful in a number of situations, but we frequently use it to help enforce multiple levels of code checks and approvals before any code is merged into a branch. Some other scenarios would include handling conflicts and pushing code to a different branch.

Alternatives

OpenText AccuRev, Apache Subversion and Mercurial

GitLab is miles ahead of the competition. In so many words, having a simple UI with robust security and the ability to conduct Git actions takes the cake. The competitions like to say they can do these things easily but their products are more confusing and hard to use.

Verified User

General Manager in Product Management (Computer Software company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

Gitlab and other tools we evaluate

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 24, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We compare gitlab and github and the scope is stay at evaluation stage. We will use GitLab if the evaluation is approved by the top leader of my organization. The main use case to use GitLab are for Source Code Management (SCM). I had tremendous amount of different computer programming languages. So the most important features is how to do hot deployment without manual intervention. The other use case is to do continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), so we can design the pipeline to detect the software errors created by developer in advance. These two uses cases are the most critical for our business.

Pros

Web Integration
Pipeline
Speed

Cons

Secrets need to support more
third party integration

Likelihood to Recommend

I would rate Gitlab 9/10. The reason I gave this high ranking is because Gitlab is All-in-One platform. I just listed two use cases from prior survey question, the SCM and CI/CD are the most important features for our business and GitLab extensive features set makes our code reviews and issue tracking more collaborative between team members and different organization.

Alternatives

GitHub, Bitbucket and TeamCity

It's much simpler than the competitors. The one important feature Gitlab stand out is the CI/CD pipeline. GitHub required integration with external CI tools but Gitlab has this feature built-in. Compare to Jenkins and Teamcity, It's easy to use without any additional Plugins. Gitlabs simple maintenance reduce a lot of our DevOps time on the tools instead they can focus more on the business related tasks.

Steve Lin

Architect in Professional Services at Clearstreet (Financial Services, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

GitLab - An ultimate platform for Code Quality and Collaboration

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 12, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

GitLab helps our team to collaborate on code , track changes that which code has been changed and pushed by whom , tracking and managing the whole project through GIT Graph and also help us for pipelines. It can easily be hosted and the main feature it helps our team Is to do code review and create a merge request to the team leader who can go through the code and review it and come under discussions and then merge it.

Pros

Helps in tracking issues , bugs and helps team in managing tasks and bugs
It can be hosted on self server which makes it very easy for us.
Best feature is providing clone and branch functionality for user to develop

Cons

Never faced such issues but for large projects it should provide ease in work and shouldnot cause delays.
It should enhance its documentation as many user and i also had to search through google for few basic steps
Should look after some additional security features

Likelihood to Recommend

It helped me and my team to create new branch , work on same branch and even help to create a clone to save our changes in another branch and work on new branch until and helped for push and pull changes , the conflicts view even helped us to manage conflicts , the pipeline feature also helped us for deploying and the best part was the self host feature.

Alternatives

AWS Lambda, Microsoft Visual Studio Code and Postman

Because with Visual Studio code, it was very easy for us to install GitLab in it and have easy access through the terminal and due to GitLab, it was easy to implement codes regarding API and AWS services to make our software better. Gitlens and all features help to check the commits and VSC allows us to integrate with various tools at once which makes it very interesting and easy.

Verified User

Team Lead in Quality Assurance (Financial Services company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

The Best CI/CD Platform

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 12, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Primary use for GitLab is of course source/version control, allowing collaboration on projects such as writing code. But GitLab does much more than that from organizing certain projects allowing the developers to track the issues/goals and the time it takes to achieve them. To easy of continues integration and continues deployment, with easy compared to other solutions.

Pros

CI/CD
K8 Integration
SSO

Cons

Regular UI changes
Resource heavy
CI Token scoping (can't push to repo in CI without creating a token manually)

Likelihood to Recommend

GitLab is an all around great solution, I think every organization would benefit from using it instead of other competitors as it outshines them greatly. Apart from ease of deployment on smaller systems due to it's quite large memory requirements for deployment for smaller things. It's great if you focus on CI/CD integration as it's seamless and also natively supports K8 integrations and it's great runner system.

Alternatives

GitHub

GitLab provides a far superior platform due to it's great integration and CI/CD focus. And while in the beginning the UI might look a bit overwhelming with use you will find it way more useful than it's competitors. The variables and settings also make way more sense and it's simple to setup and use after you use it for a short time.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (Information Technology & Services company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

It is a good remote source control software with plenty of useful integrations and customization capabilities

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 9, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use GitLab to store and manage the codebase of our organization. We have multiple projects in there but they are all part of the same platform. We do the code review in GitLab.

We also have integrated CI/CD and debugging tools, like Argo Workflows, and Grafana. We also use the integration with Jira and Slack.

Pros

CI/CD integration
Customizable approver privilege
Merge Request dependencies
Auto-merge when pipelines pass and code is approved

Cons

GitLab Code Suggestions is very poor compared to GitHub Copilot. The company decided to use Copilot instead because the GitLab one is slow and the recommendations are very basic.
Some merge requests display changes in code that has not been touched because there is a merge commit even if the changes are already in the target branch.
Sometimes it requires approval when it is not needed, but this is likely caused by the same issue of the merge commit.
When pasting a piece of text that was copied from a suggestion in the GitLab comments during code review, the text is also formatted in a code suggestion, despite there is already a suggestion in the comment.

Likelihood to Recommend

The DevOps people in the company have configured our GitLab account very well, so it is well integrated with other tools and help us with our CI/CD process. It validates that the code is already merged in the lower branches and requires approval according to some configurations. Some things are customized but GitLab allows you to do it.

Alternatives

GitHub and Bitbucket

My feedback may not be important here because when I joined the company they already had GitLab and we still use it due to the ability to do CI/CD Integration, deployments, debugging, code owners approval, and Jira integration. So far we have not had any major blocker that has made us to think about changing it to a different provider.

Andrés Alberto Herrera García

Full-stack Developer in Engineering at Ingenious.Build (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

GitLab: What a great toy!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 15, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use GitLab as the centralized version control tool for all our products/teams within the business unit. Basically GitLab helped us to have a unified platform to keep our repositories organized. Also, it addressed the issue of having different locations to grant permissions to access code. Now, everything is in just one place.

Pros

Several features when creating pull requests
Easy to configure GitLab runners to run tests
Allows to define/configure permissions using Terraform

Cons

Missing history file (diff)
Slow user interface
Commits are hard to find
Diff interface

Likelihood to Recommend

My opinion is taking into account that we were using Bitbucket in the past. The Diff interface was friendlier. The general navigation is more complicated (too many things in one place; hard to find specific things). If you want to find the commits of the repository, there is no direct access; you need to go through the menu. We miss with GitLab the ability to see diff file history when comparing with a previous commit.

Alternatives

Bitbucket Server (discontinued), GitHub and Gerrit Code

It was a management decision to use GitLab over other tools. It integrates well with RBAC using Terraform. Runners are easy to setup. Almost all the features the organization used before are available in GitLab.

Juan Orlando Cartagena Duran

DevOps Engineer in Engineering at Open LMS (E-Learning, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

If you want to own your code use GitLab!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 9, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Since I am a Drupal developer I use GitLab almost everyday to organize code related tasks (merge requests, forks, code search, pipelines etc).
For some of my Customers also I have to use GitLab as the main code repository. In this case GitLab was selected due to the self hosted option as also its open source culture.

Pros

Merge requests
CI/CD pipelines
Open Source
Integrations
Security

Cons

Code search
App performance
Code review

Likelihood to Recommend

GitLab is currently suited for:
- Collaboration
- Open source projects
- Self hosted
- Advanced security (especially for large companies)
- Low badgets

On the other hand, GitLab is less appropriate for:
- External (3rd party) integrations
- Mobile usage
- Code search across many repositories
- Built in CI/CD actions

Alternatives

GitHub and Bitbucket

For small projects or companies that do work on a few only code repositories selecting one of the git code hosting services like GitLab, GitHub, Bitbicket etc does not make a big difference.

But, if you are on a code development company that handles too many repositories and code hosting is really a big operation cost than you should consider the following in order to choose GitLab.

- Better pricing model
- Better security
- Self hosted
- Open source platform

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (Marketing & Advertising company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

GitLab: Future of DevOps

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

May 31, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We've started using GitLab in my organization for hosting git based repositories and slowly we've started using it for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery and as soon as GitLab launched container registry, package registry and dependency proxy we started to use those as well and it went amazing, GitLab is well suited to us since now we have everything in a single platform.

Pros

Hosting Git Based Source Code Repositories
Container Registry, Package Registry, Infrastructure Registry and Dependency Proxy
Service Desk and Issue management on every project
CI / CD

Cons

As per my requirements currently I don't see any scope of improvement

Likelihood to Recommend

We started to use GitLab for hosting git source code repositories of our projects only but slowly we started to use it to store container images, packages, dependency proxy as well infrastucture registry and it is now well suited for Continuous Integration in our projects, It wasn't that good in Continuous Deployment before 12.0 version but after 12.0 it is amazingly good for Continuous Deployment as well since it keeps deployment information in a well organized manner which can be configure in ci yaml configuration.

Alternatives

GitHub

GitLab is rich in features and access control if compared with GitHub also GitHub stands no where in CI/CD if compared with GitLab.

GitLab CI/CD is mature, robust and far better than GitHub actions in all means.

If I talk about quality of support and reponse time of GitLab it is very good and Emergency support is super valuable offering which let's my team to fix issues quickly.

Shivangani Tamrakar

DevOps Engineer in Information Technology at SoluLab (Information Technology & Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

GitLab is the perfect balance of aesthetics and functionality!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 8, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use GitLab for all of our versioning and source control for all scripts and code that we run on a regular basis. GitLab helps us maintain consistent code across multiple environments and allows multiple users to develop on multiple branches at the same time. We also use GitLab in correlation with Jenkins to streamline our CI/CD pipeline and deploy code quickly to our environments.

Pros

Versioning/Source Control
Provides a source of truth for Argo runner
Interface is clean and easy to use
Git CLI is easy to work with and automate push/pull with GitLab
Merge/Merge Requests/Approvals are very easy to follow and provide detailed errors when there is an issue

Cons

Navigating between branches within a repo can be difficult
In browser file editing is somewhat tedious
Errors relating to CI/CD could be more verbose

Likelihood to Recommend

One scenario that implements GitLab well in our environment is the ability to use GitLab in conjunction with our Argo runner. We are able to do builds in Jenkins that update specific values in our yaml files in GitLab that are automatically seen and implemented. We keep each environment on a different branch which helps with clarity and pushing stages up to production. We have had issues with other products in the past in trying to make this work as smoothly as it does with GitLab.

Alternatives

GitHub, GitKraken and IBM Rational ClearCase

GitLab is easily the preferred tool when it comes to versioning and source control. With other tools the UI often feels outdated and clunky leading to inefficiency and confusion. With some of the sleeker tools such as GitKraken, while the aesthetic is pleasing, the experience is plagued by a lack of support, lack of optional plugins, and a plethora of bugs that cause unnecessary legwork to resolve. GitLab is the best of both aesthetic and functionality

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Computer Networking company, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Loading Reviews List....

It is a good remote source control software with plenty of useful integrations and customization capabilities

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 9, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use GitLab to store and manage the codebase of our organization. We have multiple projects in there but they are all part of the same platform. We do the code review in GitLab.

We also have integrated CI/CD and debugging tools, like Argo Workflows, and Grafana. We also use the integration with Jira and Slack.

Pros

CI/CD integration
Customizable approver privilege
Merge Request dependencies
Auto-merge when pipelines pass and code is approved

Cons

GitLab Code Suggestions is very poor compared to GitHub Copilot. The company decided to use Copilot instead because the GitLab one is slow and the recommendations are very basic.
Some merge requests display changes in code that has not been touched because there is a merge commit even if the changes are already in the target branch.
Sometimes it requires approval when it is not needed, but this is likely caused by the same issue of the merge commit.
When pasting a piece of text that was copied from a suggestion in the GitLab comments during code review, the text is also formatted in a code suggestion, despite there is already a suggestion in the comment.

Likelihood to Recommend

Alternatives

GitHub and Bitbucket

Andrés Alberto Herrera García

Full-stack Developer in Engineering at Ingenious.Build (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile