FOSSA vs GitLab comparison

FOSSA and GitLab are both solutions in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category. FOSSA is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.0, while GitLab is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.3. FOSSA holds a 3.1% mindshare in SCA, compared to GitLab’s 3.8% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of FOSSA users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of GitLab users who would recommend it.

FOSSA

Read 15 FOSSA reviews

1,810 Views
1,756 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

GitLab

Read 91 GitLab reviews

17,819 Views
1,604 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

FOSSA

GitLab

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

GitLab and FOSSA compete in the software development and deployment category. GitLab seems to have the upper hand in CI/CD pipeline management and integration, while FOSSA stands out in open-source license compliance and legal collaboration.

Features: GitLab offers effective continuous integration, code review, and branch management, facilitating collaborative development. It integrates DevOps and version control, providing user-friendly deployment and security features. FOSSA specializes in open-source management and compliance, with a robust policy engine automating license scanning and offering quick feedback on security issues.

Room for Improvement: GitLab faces integration challenges, especially with non-Kubernetes environments, and seeks advancements in metrics and third-party tool integration. Users also express concerns over pricing and cloud-native features. FOSSA needs to enhance user experience, dashboard functionalities, security scans, and project categorization, with improved policy documentation as frequently requested.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: GitLab supports various deployment options, including public, private, on-premises, and hybrid clouds, with community-based support needing improved responsiveness. FOSSA, primarily deploying in public and on-premises settings, has knowledgeable support but could improve onboarding and documentation for better user experiences.

Pricing and ROI: GitLab offers free and premium tiers, with the higher tiers seen as costly for smaller teams. Users consider the pricing reasonable but note significant cost jumps between tiers. FOSSA's competitive pricing, although not cheap, provides significant ROI, reducing compliance workloads and offering a licensing model that aligns with user utilization patterns.

To learn more, read our detailed FOSSA vs. GitLab Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

FOSSA vs. GitLab

December 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

FOSSA

Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

9th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

GitLab

Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

4th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Security Tools (8th), Build Automation (1st), Release Automation (2nd), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (5th), Rapid Application Development Software (9th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (2nd), Fuzz Testing Tools (2nd), DevSecOps (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of FOSSA is 3.1%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GitLab is 3.8%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
GitLab	3.8%
FOSSA	3.1%
Other	93.1%

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Featured Reviews

reviewer2588340

Senior Software Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Dependency management enhanced with update suggestions but lacks precise vulnerability tracking

FOSSA does not show the exact line of code with vulnerabilities, which adds time to the process as we have to locate these manually. Some other tools like Check Point or SonarQube provide exact line numbers for bugs. Also, the process in FOSSA can be quite contradicting and not very straightforward for new users.

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BasilJiji

System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Role-based workflows have transformed daily deployments and improve team collaboration

GitLab has role-based access control, so when a team member needs to make a code change, they cannot directly apply it to the environment but must put in a merge request. Once a senior reviews the code and approves it, then it is implemented across the environment, making it safer and allowing everyone to experience the process. The best features GitLab offers are version control and automation, which are the major things that stand out to me. When it comes to access, the login is very smooth, with just one login integrated with our Okta, allowing everyone to log in easily. Deployments become much easier, and that is how GitLab helps. The automation features make my work easier because we use a tool called AWX, which is connected to GitLab. Whenever we run a job on AWX, it directly checks the code and uses it. Since the code is not preserved locally but kept in the cloud, it is safe and nobody can tamper with it. When it comes to safety, that is a major thing. Automation features allow the code to be accessed from any tools we use, so the jobs we run are helping tremendously and doing their work perfectly. For pipeline tasks, we have created a significant amount of pipelines, which are all hosted in GitLab. Running the pipelines has become much easier, and they are doing a perfect job, helping tremendously in our day-to-day activities. GitLab has positively impacted my organization because previously we stored code locally on servers, leading to many risks. Since GitLab came into our environment, our integration and deployments became much easier, helping our work become much smoother. Improvements from GitLab have led to better team collaboration because when several people are working, they can all edit the code and submit it as a merge request, and once approved, it reflects directly to the main branch. Many can work at the same time. When it comes to deployments, deploying has become much faster since we started using GitLab, and even if errors occur, we can spot them easily and troubleshoot, which has helped tremendously.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The support team has just been amazing, and it helps us to have a great support team from FOSSA. They are there to triage and answer all our questions which come up by using their product."

"Being able to know the licenses of the libraries is most valuable because we sell products, and we need to provide to the customers the licenses that we are using."

"The most valuable feature is its ability to identify all of the components in a build, and then surface the licenses that are associated with it, allowing us to make a decision as to whether or not we allow a team to use the components. That eliminates the risk that comes with running consumer software that contains open source components."

"Policies and identification of open-source licensing issues are the most valuable features. It reduces the time needed to identify open-source software licensing issues."

"The scalability is excellent."

"FOSSA is easy to use and set up, provides relatively accurate results, and doesn't require armies of people to get value from its use."

"What I really need from FOSSA, and it does a really good job of this, is to flag me when there are particular open source licenses that cause me or our legal department concern. It points out where a particular issue is, where it comes from, and the chain that brought it in, which is the most important part to me."

"One of the things that I really like about FOSSA is that it allows you to go very granular. For example, if there's a package that's been flagged because it's subject to a license that may be conflicts with or raises a concern with one of the policies that I've set, then FOSSA enables you to go really granular into that package to see which aspects of the package are subject to which licenses. We can ultimately determine with our engineering teams if we really need this part of the package or not. If it's raising this flag, we can make really actionable decisions at a very micro level to enable the build to keep pushing forward."

More FOSSA pros

"The most valuable feature of GitLab is the ability to upload scripts and make changes when needed and then reupload them. Additionally, the solution is user-friendly."

"GitLab has positively impacted my organization by being faster than other platforms and providing the best user interface and features."

"The initial setup of GitLab is pretty simple, with no complications."

"The most important features of GitLab for us are issue management and all the CI/CD tools. Another aspect that I love about GitLab is the UI."

"The user interface is really good so that helps with huge teams who need to collaborate."

"The merging feature makes it easy later on for the deployment."

"We use GitLab in the new project for CI/CD, integration, and deployment."

"The code merging capability is something that we use very frequently."

More GitLab pros

Cons

"We have seen some inaccuracies or incompleteness with the distribution acknowledgments for an application, so there's certainly some room for improvement there. Another big feature that's missing that should be introduced is snippet matching, meaning, not just matching an entire component, but matching a snippet of code that had been for another project and put in different files that one of our developers may have created."

"I would like more customized categories because our company is so big. This is doable for them. They are still in the stages of trying to figure this out since we are one of their biggest companies that they support."

"I wish there was a way that you could have a more global rollout of it, instead of having to do it in each repository individually. It's possible, that's something that is offered now, or maybe if you were using the CI Jenkins, you'd be able to do that. But with Travis, there wasn't an easy way to do that. At least not that I could find. That was probably the biggest issue."

"I want the product to include binary scanning which is missing at the moment. Binary scanning includes code and component matching through dependency management. It also includes the actual scanning and reverse engineering of the boundaries and finding out what is inside."

"I would like the FOSSA API to be broader. I would like not to have to interact with the GUI at all, to do the work that I want to do. I would like them to do API-first development, rather than a focus on the GUI."

"On the legal and policy sides, there is some room for improvement. I know that our legal team has raised complaints about having to approve the same dependency multiple times, as opposed to having them it across the entire organization."

"On the dashboard, there should be an option to increase the column width so that we can see the complete name of the GitHub repository. Currently, on the dashboard, we see the list of projects, but to see the complete name, you have to hover your mouse over an item, which is annoying."

"If you have thousands of applications, organizing them all into teams or tags is challenging."

More FOSSA cons

"Their RBAC is role-based access, which is fine but not very good."

"We would like to have easier tutorials. Their tutorials are too technical for a user to understand. They should be more detailed but less technical."

"Some of the scripts that we encountered in GitLab were not fully functional and threw up errors."

"For as long as I have used GitLab, I haven't encountered any major limitations. However, I think that perhaps the search functionality could be better."

"GitLab needs to improve the CI/CD functionality because it is not compatible with Jenkins and other tools, as it is not that efficient."

"I believe GitLab can be improved by making integration with other platforms a little easier."

"There are missing search features, particularly when searching repositories or applying filters. Additionally, I have encountered issues with the deployment of CI/CD pipelines, especially dealing with variable environments."

"It would be better if there weren't any outages. There are occasions where we usually see a lot of outages using GitLab. It happens at least once a week or something like that. Whatever pipelines you're running, to check the logs, you need to have a different set of tools like Argus or something like that. If you have pipelines running on GitLab, you need a separate service deployed to view the logs, which is kind of a pain. If the logs can be used conveniently on GitLab, that would be definitely helpful. I'm not talking about the CI/CD pipelines but the back-end services and microservices deployed over GitLab. To view the logs for those microservices, you need to have separate log viewers, which is kind of a pain."

More GitLab cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price is reasonable as compared to the market. It is competitively priced in comparison to other similar solutions on the market. It is also quite affordable in terms of the value that it delivers as compared to its alternative of hiring a team."

"FOSSA is not cheap, but their offering is top-notch. It is very much a "you get what you pay for" scenario. Regardless of the price, I highly recommend FOSSA."

"FOSSA is a fairly priced product. It is not either cheaper or expensive. The pricing lies somewhere in the middle. The solution is worth the money that we are spending to use it."

"The solution's cost is a five out of ten."

"The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free."

"I'm not aware of the licensing costs because those were covered by the customer."

"Its price is fine. It is on the cheaper side and not expensive. You have to pay additionally for GitLab CI/CD minutes. Initially, we used the free version. When we ran out of GitLab minutes, we migrated to the paid version."

"We are using its free version, and we are evaluating its Premium version. Its Ultimate version is very expensive."

"The solution is based on a subscription model and is reasonably priced."

"In terms of the pricing for GitLab, on a scale of one to five, with one being expensive and five being cheap, I'm rating pricing for the solution a four. It could still be cheaper because right now, my company has a small team, and sometimes it's difficult to use a paid product for a small team. You'd hope the team will grow and scale, but currently, you're paying a high license fee for a small team. I'm referring to the GitLab license that has premium features and will give you all features. This can be a problem for management to approve the high price of the license for a team this small."

"I think that we pay approximately $100 USD per month."

"I'm not sure if they have some kind of discount. I've been negotiating with them on prices before, and I believe they weren't too happy to give discounts, but list prices are $19 per user, per month for Premium and $99 per user, per month for Ultimate. So, the difference between Premium and Ultimate is a bit bigger, and in most companies, you need to build some type of business case."

"GitLab is cheap."

More GitLab pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	36
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	46

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FOSSA?

The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free. You have to pay for the features you need, which I think is fair. If you want to get value for free...

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What needs improvement with FOSSA?

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What is your primary use case for FOSSA?

I have worked with FOSSA primarily to manage the dependencies in our projects. For example, if I take a Spring Boot application, FOSSA helps in identifying mismatches or unsupported dependencies th...

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What do you like most about GitLab?

I find the features and version control history to be most valuable for our development workflow. These aspects provide us with a clear view of changes and help us manage requests efficiently.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitLab?

The setup cost was moderate and not very high. For GitLab SaaS, the initial setup cost was minimal, while self-managed GitLab involved infrastructure, VM storage backups, runner configuration, and ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with GitLab?

A pain point I have encountered with GitLab is that large GitLab-ci.yml files become hard to read and maintain. YAML syntax is strict, and errors are easy to make, while debugging pipeline logic ca...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

FOSSA

January 2026

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Buyer's Guide

GitLab

January 2026

Download GitLab product report

Also Known As

No data available

Fuzzit

Overview

Up to 90% of any piece of software is from open source, creating countless dependencies and areas of risk to manage. FOSSA is the most reliable automated policy engine for legal teams to maintain license compliance, security to fix vulnerabilities, and engineering to improve code quality across the entire software supply chain. As the only developer-native open source management platform, FOSSA fully integrates with your existing CI/CD pipeline to provide complete visibility and context earlier in the software development lifecycle. For the first time, teams can collaboratively shift left and audit, analyze, control, and remediate license issues and vulnerabilities right in their existing workflows.

FOSSA

GitLab offers a secure and user-friendly platform for CI/CD pipeline management, code repository control, and collaboration, enhancing development speed and efficiency. It facilitates automation with extensive customization and tool integration, ideal for DevOps processes.

GitLab supports source code management, version control, and collaborative development. It's frequently used in CI/CD processes to automate builds and deployments while integrating DevOps practices. GitLab allows companies to manage repositories, automate pipelines, conduct code reviews, and maintain development lifecycles. The platform supports infrastructure and configuration management, enabling efficient code collaboration, deployment automation, and comprehensive repository handling. Many organizations commit and deploy developed code using GitLab's capabilities.

What are GitLab's most valuable features?

CI/CD Pipeline Management: Streamlines development through automated testing and deployment.
User-Friendly Interface: Ensures ease of collaboration and task automation.
Code Merging and Branching: Facilitates smooth code integration and version control.
Security Platform: Provides strong security features for safe development.
Tool Integration: Enhances functionality with diverse tool integration.

What benefits should users evaluate?

Development Speed: Accelerates processes through automation.
Collaboration Ease: Simplifies team interactions and workflow.
Customization Options: Offers extensive personalization for specific needs.
Comprehensive Documentation: Provides detailed guidance for users.
Secure Platform: Maintains integrity with robust security features.

In specific industries, GitLab serves as a backbone for source code management and CI/CD implementation. Companies leverage its capabilities for infrastructure management and deployment automation, thus streamlining project delivery timelines. Its ability to handle configuration management and code repositories effectively aids in maintaining development lifecycles, making it a preferred choice for organizations committed to enhancing their DevOps practices.

GitLab

Sample Customers

AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent

1. NASA 2. IBM 3. Sony 4. Alibaba 5. CERN 6. Siemens 7. Volkswagen 8. ING 9. Ticketmaster 10. SpaceX 11. Adobe 12. Intuit 13. Autodesk 14. Rakuten 15. Unity Technologies 16. Pandora 17. Electronic Arts 18. Nordstrom 19. Verizon 20. Comcast 21. Philips 22. Deutsche Telekom 23. Orange 24. Fujitsu 25. Ericsson 26. Nokia 27. General Electric 28. Cisco 29. Accenture 30. Deloitte 31. PwC 32. KPMG

Buyer's Guide

FOSSA vs. GitLab

December 2025

Free Report: FOSSA vs. GitLab

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