GitLab Premium Reviews

GitLab Premium is being used, but the CI/CD functionality is not utilized. GitLab also provides the entire CI/CD ecosystem, but that is not being used. GitLab Premium is used for version controlling only.

The primary use case for GitLab Premium is version controlling. Version controlling and triggering capabilities are available, and GitLab configuration is good, but not comparable to GitHub.

GitLab Premium is used for internal needs only.

GitHub Actions are used for enterprise clients, as GitHub is widely used across the enterprise client base. Maximum enterprise clients are using GitHub, while some clients are using Azure Repos. For internal purposes, GitLab Premium is used because most proof of concept work has been done with Jenkins, and automation testing is also performed with Jenkins. A dedicated server for GitLab Premium is maintained because there are more than 350 users. If GitHub were implemented instead, it would be costlier. GitLab Premium is less costly, which is the main reason for the choice.

GitHub is used widely for enterprise clients, while GitLab Premium is used as a customer and user solution.

Advanced scheduling capability for pipelines does not impact build and deployment speed. This is not felt because integration has been done with a Jenkins project. More than 100 projects are integrated with the Jenkins CI/CD pipeline, and all those repositories are in GitLab Premium only. No lag or slowness is experienced because webhooks have been integrated with all pipelines for auto build triggers. Builds are triggered within seconds.

The biggest benefit from GitLab Premium is that both repository management systems are good, as both GitHub and GitLab are valuable. The main advantage is that GitLab Premium has community support. For small organizations, GitLab Premium is good in all aspects. However, for enterprise use, GitLab Premium is also chargeable, though not to the same extent as GitHub.

When discussing improvements for GitLab Premium, the main area is the GUI. GitHub's GUI is very good, offering many collaboration options and the ability to customize dashboards. GitHub's look and feel is superior, but GitLab Premium's dashboard is very simple.

Regarding capabilities lacking in GitLab Premium, the main concern is the GUI. For example, in GitHub, there is a right side profile where settings can be directly accessed, and there is a direct section for developer mode with clear segregation. In GitLab Premium, when accessing users, confusion sometimes arises between root user and main user. There is an option for groups, but it is not direct. When clicking on groups, it goes to another section where groups must be found. This hierarchy could be more straightforward and direct.

The biggest drawbacks of GitLab Premium are GUI and configuration. GUI is the primary concern, but other aspects are good.

A stability rating of eight points is given for GitLab Premium.

GitLab Premium's scalability is rated at 8.5.

Technical support is felt to be good, but not comparable to GitHub. There is some additional response time, which sometimes feels like a delay. Fast response is needed, but not to the level provided by Microsoft.

Positive

Regarding installation and deployment, GitLab Premium is quite easy to deploy. This is confirmed by the fact that more than 100 projects are managed by GitLab Premium and integrated with Jenkins CI/CD. Build and deployment are quite seamless.

Regarding ROI with GitLab Premium, in terms of price, GitLab Premium is better because it is less expensive. GitHub is much more costly.

Regarding whether GitLab Premium is rentable, much clarity cannot be provided because all of these matters are handled by the network management team. Return on investment cannot be provided with much clarity because when working for enterprise clients, they pay hourly for IT systems. These things may be affordable or if they are costlier, they are managed when clients pay the company. GitLab Premium is manageable, and there is no additional complexity regarding ROI.

GitLab Premium is affordable in terms of pricing, while GitHub is a bit pricier. If working with a much more complex and vast organization at the enterprise level, GitHub would be the choice. If operating a small organization or startup company without much complex scenarios, GitLab Premium is good.

Regarding code review enhancements, GitLab Premium is being used for code-based implementation. For new enterprise clients, GitHub is preferred, but for startup companies that are new to development and operations, GitLab Premium is good because it does not charge much more than GitHub. For small organizations, small teams, and small companies, GitLab Premium is good. For the enterprise level, if working with much complex operations, much greater security, and much more usability and accessibility regarding user access and parameters, GitHub is preferred.

The company relationship with Microsoft and GitHub is as a service provider, while with GitLab Premium, the relationship is as a customer and user.

If operating a startup company, GitLab Premium should be used, as GitLab Premium also provides a community edition with which many things can be done that are available on GitHub.

Regarding scheduling for pipelines, advanced scheduling capability does not impact build and deployment speed. This is not felt because integration has been done with a Jenkins project. All repositories are in GitLab Premium only. No lag or slowness is experienced because webhooks have been integrated with all pipelines for auto build triggers. Whenever any developer pushes any commit or code to the GitLab Premium repository, it automatically triggers within seconds.

The biggest benefit from GitLab Premium is that both repository management systems are good, as both GitHub and GitLab are valuable. The main advantage is that GitLab Premium has community support. For small organizations, GitLab Premium is good in all aspects. However, for enterprise use, GitLab Premium is also chargeable, though not to the same extent as GitHub.

This review has been rated with an overall rating of eight out of ten.

We are working with Black Duck, but we do have some plans to move to another vendor down the line.

Black Duck is used mostly for security checks. For coverage, we are using a tool called SonarQube.

Black Duck is explicitly used for security checks on code, for example, open-source software.

We perform scans with Black Duck Security Checker, but software developers handle the post-remediations and mitigation of risks and vulnerabilities.

For CI/CD, we are using GitLab Premium for our repositories. We have Artifactory for all artifact storage from JFrog Artifactory. We have Black Duck for security checks, SonarQube for coverage and unit testing, and Ansible for configuration management along with other tools.

These tools are used for our CI/CD pipelines, running all our pipelines and having unit test cases executed with SonarQube and Black Duck for security checks.

GitLab Premium is a one-place platform. You don't have to jump between other tools for multi-stage scanning. You can run multi-stage pipelines all together from building source code, testing source code, running test cases, performing security checks, deploying CI/CD, and end-to-end integration to deployment all in one place.

It is quick and fast. The pipelines run quicker, and the background job processes are efficient. It is multi-threaded operation so it is quite fast.

It is simple to use. You just need to have a good knowledge base, and by getting hands-on experience, you are all set.

It could be better, but now that we have migrated to Siemens Energy, GitLab Premium is being actively looked after by another team. We are just making sure that GitLab Premium administration is being done by us.

We are not using the security testing capabilities in GitLab Premium. For security we are using a separate tool.

The automation part could be improved. Nowadays AI is being actively used, and if we could integrate something like ChatGPT with GitLab Premium, it would be easier for us to check logs and debug faster.

We could integrate security and coverage built-in within GitLab Premium instead of relying on third-party tools.

I have been working with GitLab Premium for the last four years.

We stopped working with Chef. We do have Chef for releases and a different process for our own product where Chef is being used. However, I am not using Chef. Instead, we have switched to Ansible for most of our configuration management.

GitHub is a product I can compare with GitLab Premium.

GitLab Premium is much more reliable, quicker, faster, and basically easier to operate compared to GitHub. It is easy to get things on track. GitHub requires a lot of knowledge. It is easy to spin up any kind of environment and it is easy to be hosted.

We were on the desktop, and now GitLab Premium is on cloud.

I am not really sure about the purchase process for GitLab Premium.

I am a GitLab Premium end-user.

I give this product a rating of eight out of ten.

I use ClickHouse and get logs from ClickHouse. I use Loki sometimes. Prometheus is always a thing with Grafana that I use hand-to-hand. Mostly it's Loki and ClickHouse.

I had tried to use TimescaleDB once, but it wasn't an easier option to integrate and set things up, so I just lifted it off and I'm using Loki and ClickHouse for now.

My company doesn't allow me to use any cloud-based services as of now, so everything has to be on-premises and self-hosted. For that reason, I don't use any additional third-party services. But in the near future, when I have the flexibility and liberty of doing it in my organization, I would definitely choose to go for third-party options.

I use GitLab. I use GitLab on our own independent storage servers over here and everything is in-house as I said. We use GitLab and version control all of our codebases and model artifacts and other assets locally in our own storage servers.

The main reason we use GitLab is because we are not supposed to store our code on any other external cloud services. We need to have our own in-house storage solution and in-house version controlling system. Any architecture that we design, we need to have it in-house and air-gapped from the rest of the world. Everything has to be in our control. The bare-metal vertical integration of having servers in our own premises is the reason why I use GitLab.

I appreciate the UI. It's very simple as well as intuitive at the same time. The biggest functionality that I appreciate is that GitLab gives you the liberty to self-host things on your own and keeps things on-premises, as well as being very API-friendly, similar to the original GitHub. There is no cumbersome learning curve to adapt GitLab separately from GitHub. It's a seamless transition switching from the standard GitHub to GitLab.

It's a good UI to work with. GitLab is a consolidation of all of the services. I can use my Docker container builds and my images and store them locally. I can pull those builds and use Docker as well as integrate Docker in the version control pipeline. It becomes very seamless. Sometimes my containers go down or I need to spin up a new node of a computer on its own in my local infrastructure. The system already has a cron job which goes and fetches the appropriate Docker, the latest Docker build with the correct Docker image and it pulls it off.

I would appreciate some more tutorials being put out in the mainstream media like on YouTube, where I could go and learn more about GitLab. Reading a deep dive into the documentation and meddling things on my own, then going and educating my whole team on that is a cumbersome task. I would appreciate if nice, customized YouTube tutorials would be available on YouTube by the official GitLab or maybe by some third-party YouTubers that you guys could partner with, similar to what PyTorch or Weights & Biases have done to democratize the use of their software tools. That would be great on my end.

I have been using GitLab Premium for exactly two years.

I would give a rating of eleven in that case, because we never had a downtime with GitLab Premium. It has never let us down.

I couldn't have an opinion on that because, as I said, we do things in-house. Scalability and the type of auto-scaling or scale-up that we need to do is on my system administrators.

I absolutely am still working with Grafana. For the most part, only partially for some small, tiny projects, I have moved to SigNoz. But for my main, primarily mega, mega foundational projects, the spectacular, the hero projects of my organization, I always prefer Grafana.

It is complex. It takes a good amount of time. Had I had to do it again, I would definitely use an AI agent to do it, because back then two years ago, when I was setting up GitLab Premium on my own in my enterprise, I had to take a good amount of four days to set things up and to seamlessly test everything so that things are working perfectly across my teams.

As of now, I haven't used that. My organization is pretty slim. Our technical team picks up things on their own and does things on their own independently. It's a one-man army kind of developer space in our organization. For that reason, we don't have any cross-communication with developers. Whatever happens, happens verbally, and for that reason, we don't use Jira or any other ticketing solutions.

It's not my responsibility. I have a system admin who looks into the security part of it, but we haven't meddled with any specific functionalities in the security side of it. Whatever we get standard in-house with the default configurations, we just use it.

There are several alternate solutions available.

We don't work in code review. Our developers write their own test cases. Once the test cases pass, the code goes into the specific another department. A solutions architect or a tech lead would be a suitable role for implementation of GitLab Premium. I give this product a rating of ten out of ten.

My use case for GitLab Premium involves consolidating multiple tools for different use cases such as performance testing, SAST, DAST, project management, and advanced project management. Initially, the organization was using close to eight or nine different tools. When I joined this organization as a consultant, they were already using the intermediate level of GitLab within the ecosystem. I recommended that rather than using multiple tools while already paying for them, they add some additional budget and move to GitLab Premium. This would help reduce the maintenance and management of multiple tools and eventually reduce the overall licensing cost.

The functions I found most valuable in GitLab Premium start with the core functionality of Git and version controlling, which is quite solid. The integrations and built-in capabilities provided for security, infrastructure management, SAST, DAST, performance testing, and advanced-level project management make it a solid tool to use.

The code review feature in GitLab Premium improves my development process, and it represents the most basic functionality they provide. It is quite effective to use, particularly the merge request feature that they have.

The planning tools in GitLab Premium, such as roadmaps, help my team manage projects and timelines effectively.

The main benefits I received from GitLab Premium are that I save money and streamline my management process of applications. I am able to reduce costs and maintenance time because I do not have to maintain multiple tools, multiple servers for those tools, or multiple licenses. This helps to reduce both costs and man-hours significantly.

GitLab Premium is quite solid now, though there is always room for improvement. They provide a feature for integrating it with provisioning tools such as Terraform and others, but if they could provide direct integration and a segregated unit or feature that helps manage files and maintain versioning in a more visualized way, that could significantly improve the capability.

I have not come across anything lacking in functionality within GitLab Premium that I am looking for. In the future, if there is something, I might suggest it. As of now, whatever the demands of the clients I am working for, GitLab Premium is fulfilling that with the version and capabilities they provide, so I am satisfied.

I have been working with GitLab Premium for approximately four years now since my client opted for it.

I rate the stability of GitLab Premium as nine out of ten since I never encounter any issues with it, though there might be some minor ones.

The scalability of GitLab Premium is quite solid. I can rate it as ten considering we started with twenty users initially for this particular client when we opted for Premium, and we have scaled up to over one thousand two hundred users so far without facing any challenges.

I rate the technical support from GitLab positively based on my experience. I have approached them a couple of times for issues I was unable to understand or implement, and I received solid support and inputs to fix those issues.

Positive

The initial setup process for GitLab Premium is simple, as we are using their SaaS platform. There is no setup involved; we just need to create an account, and then it is ready to use. It is a plug and play solution.

The comparison of GitLab Premium with competitors shows that it is not unique. There are other tools available with similar features, such as GitHub and Azure DevOps from Microsoft, which also offer almost the same functionalities.

For me, the main reason to choose GitLab Premium is that it provides all the same functionality for a lower price compared to other platforms. They are almost the same in terms of cost. It all depends on how a sales team approaches the management. I mainly work as an executor and implementer, providing suggestions and conducting POCs, but the final decision is with the client. Clients are approached by different sales representatives to choose their product or others. We provide them inputs, features, and ratings, and then it is up to them which product they proceed with. GitLab Premium does come with a couple of extra features that are not available in other products on the market now, so it has a premium edge.

I require clarification on which feedback about the effectiveness of GitLab Premium for audit events you are asking about.

Overall, I give GitLab Premium a final rating of nine out of ten for the product. I give GitLab Premium a rating of nine out of ten.

I continue to recommend GitLab Premium to different clients where I work.

The merge request features in GitLab Premium impact development processes significantly because it's a collaboration tool. Different developers can work on their portion and then request a merge. The person can merge all the codes together into a main branch, and when deployed, everything would be deployed together.

The features in GitLab Premium that are the most useful include CI/CD capabilities and code check-ins.

The main benefits from advanced CI/CD capabilities in GitLab Premium include automation to pull and merge the codes together, and it's all done automatically. Users can set this up, making it quite straightforward. From coding to deployment, if the whole process is automated properly, it's a matter of seconds.

The security management functionality in GitLab Premium provides some application security testing, which is adequate. However, for a full security suite, upgrading to Ultimate is necessary.

In terms of improvement for GitLab Premium, not necessarily GitLab Premium specifically but GitLab as a whole could enhance features on the project management side. They could look at their sprints based on effort rather than by weightage or by the number of issues. Additionally, it's important to ensure that deployed code is authentic and hasn't been modified by unauthorized parties.

I have not faced any issues with stability.

GitLab Premium is a scalable solution that can be easily scaled by adding licenses.

I have had the opportunity to talk with technical support for some issues, and they were quick to respond.

Positive

The setup experience for GitLab Premium is easy.

On a scale from one to ten, where ten means very easy setup, I would rate it an eight.

Deploying GitLab Premium for the first time takes about a day to set things up properly. Once it has been set up, the deployment from code to production runs in minutes.

GitLab has their own AI chatbot, GitLab Duo, but when they introduced it to us, it was still very new. I have not had a chance to explore it yet.

Regarding the cost of GitLab Premium, they recently revised their price, but we received the earlier price, and they maintained it, making it reasonable.

For those planning to use GitLab Premium, it's beneficial for code repository management and automates many tasks. Setup is required once, and multiple deployments can be performed afterward.

I would give GitLab Premium a total rating of eight out of ten.