GitLab vs Jenkins comparison

GitLab and Jenkins are both solutions in the Build Automation category. GitLab is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.6, while Jenkins is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.1. GitLab holds a 15.9% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 10.4% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of GitLab users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Jenkins users who would recommend it.

GitLab

Read 84 GitLab reviews

5,610 Views
4,770 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 93 Jenkins reviews

3,959 Views
3,390 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

GitLab

Jenkins

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Jenkins and GitLab compete in the CI/CD automation domain. Based on feature richness and value clarity, Jenkins holds the upper hand due to its versatile plugin ecosystem offering extensive customization.

Features: Jenkins is known for its extensive plugin ecosystem, allowing for seamless automation. Its open-source nature and strong community support enable a range of customization through plugins and Groovy scripting. Jenkins excels at continuous integration and deployment, making it vital for managing complex delivery pipelines. GitLab offers robust CI/CD capabilities with seamless tool integration, a user-friendly interface simplifying collaboration and deployments, and comprehensive version control and DevOps features appealing to organizations seeking a unified platform.

Room for Improvement: Jenkins users highlight the need for an updated interface and stability improvements for lesser-used plugins. The installation process requires enhancements to streamline plugin dependencies and expand out-of-the-box features. GitLab, despite its Kubernetes integration, needs better AWS support, enhanced leadership metrics, and reporting features. Users of GitLab's community edition seek improved security and integration with third-party applications.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Jenkins is primarily used for on-premises installations, heavily relying on its large open-source user base for community support. GitLab is community-driven but provides more structured user experiences suitable for hybrid cloud environments along with formal support channels in paid tiers.

Pricing and ROI: Jenkins, being open-source, offers significant cost savings ideal for teams using its extensive plugins without high licensing costs, making it appealing to budget-conscious organizations. GitLab provides free and paid versions, with its Premium and Ultimate tiers offering advanced support and features that are justified by larger enterprises but challenging for smaller teams due to cost concerns.

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

Buyer's Guide

GitLab vs. Jenkins

April 2025

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Helped 851,604 peers since 2012

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

GitLab

Ranking in Build Automation

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Security Tools (9th), Release Automation (2nd), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (7th), Rapid Application Development Software (11th), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (5th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (2nd), Fuzz Testing Tools (2nd), DevSecOps (3rd)

Jenkins

Ranking in Build Automation

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GitLab is 15.9%, down from 18.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 10.4%, down from 13.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Rohit Kesharwani

Manager, Engineering at 7-Eleven

Improved agility and time to market with CI/CD enhancements

The CI/CD pipelines in GitLab ( /products/gitlab-reviews ) are highly valuable. Another important feature is the single source of repository, allowing efficient repository management and source code management. GitLab provides manageability by allowing us to manage source code effectively through separate repositories. Additionally, GitLab enables the creation of individual CI/CD pipelines for each repository, making software more agile. By integrating GitLab as a DevOps platform, we have enhanced agility, improved our time to market, and different teams can work collaboratively on various projects.

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Dinesh-Patil

Consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

A highly-scalable and stable solution that reduces deployment time and produces a significant return on investment

The dashboard needs to be improved. Though the access management and authentication functionalities are present, the dashboard and UI could be more user-friendly. The product has many plug-ins. Users have to go through the documentation to be able to use the product. The UI must be more user-friendly. The information should be available in the dashboard itself. The users shouldn’t have to refer to the documentation. When a user hovers over the elements on the dashboard, it should reveal information about them.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I recommend GitLab for DevOps engineers."

"The solution's most valuable feature is that it is compatible with GitHub. The product's integration capabilities are sufficient for our small company of 35 people."

"It's a great toolbox where the CI/CD pipeline is the fundamental component, but there are so many other features that you can pull from, which makes it a very powerful tool. My current client is using AWS, and they can, of course, use AWS CodePipeline, but GitLab is much more mature than that, and it also gives you the freedom to decide to go to another platform or have a multi-cloud strategy and things like that. That freedom for me is also very valuable."

"GitLab's source control is excellent."

"We like that we can have an all-encompassing product and don't have to implement different solutions."

"GitLab is very well-organized and easy to use. Also, it offers most features that customers need."

"The most valuable features of Gitlab are integration with CIE and the ability to rapidly deploy solutions, projects, and applications. It is very easy to use, and there are no complaints."

"If you want to maintain your issues in GitLab and raise your book of work and features, then GitLab is a great tool for collaboration and integration with code deployment and CICD pipelines."

More GitLab pros

"I love Jenkins. I like that you work on anything, and you make anything. Jenkins is very important for my team. I am satisfied with the product."

"For business needs, Jenkins is the most relevant choice because it can be self-hosted, the price is good, it’s robust, and requires almost no effort for maintenance."

"It is very useful for us to be able to collect and manage automatic processing pipelines."

"The most valuable features of Jenkins are the integration of automatic scripts for testing and the user's ability to use any script."

"Jenkins allows us to automate deployment, so I no longer have to do it manually. That's the primary use case. The other advantage of Jenkins is that it's open source. It was free for me to download and install. It's a product that's been in use for many years, so I can find a lot of support online for any issues that I may encounter while configuring anything for a given use case."

"Jenkins has excellent task planning features."

"We benefit from Kubernetes' ability to autoscale pods and use horizontal pod autoscalers to adjust the number of pods based on metrics like CPU or memory usage, ensuring efficient resource allocation and stability under load."

"Jenkins is a very mature product."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"We'd always like to see better pricing on the product."

"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."

"Merge conflicts and repository maintenance could improve. If there is someone new to the system they would not know if there is a conflict."

"GitLab can improve the integration with third-party applications. It could be made easier. Additionally, having API control from my application could be helpful."

"There was a problem with the build environment when we were looking at developing iOS applications. iOS build require Mac machines and there are no Mac machines provided by GitLab in their cloud. So to build for mobile iOS application, we needed to use our own Mac machine within our own infrastructure. If GitLab were to provide a feature such that an iOS application could also be built through GitLab directly, that would be great."

"The pricing has been substantially increased, which is a major concern."

"It's more related to the supporting layer of features, such as issue management and issue tracking. We tend to always use, for example, Jira next to it. That doesn't mean that GitLab should build something similar to Jira because that will always have its place, but they could grow a bit in those kinds of supporting features. I see some, for example, covering ITSM on a DevOps team level, and that's one of the things that I and my current client would find really helpful. It's understandably not going to be their main focus and their core, and whenever you are with a company that needs a bit more advanced features on that specific topic, you're probably still going to integrate with another tool like Jira Service Management, for example. However, some basic features on things like that could be really helpful."

"Technologies are always changing. Nowadays, new things like serverless computing and workload management have emerged. We have noticed a few gap items for faster service delivery. For example, we do user interface testing in the latest team and automate it using some tools. Recently, we integrated a tool with user interface testing, which can simulate a multi-user environment. So, we would like to see more integration with different platforms."

More GitLab cons

"Jenkins should adopt the Pipeline as Code approach by building a deployment pipeline using the Jenkins file."

"Jenkins could have better cloud functionality. Currently, we are using the existing legacy model, but we are moving toward the cloud, so it would be great if they could improve in that area. In the future, I would like more cloud features and related training materials, like a video tutorial."

"The learning curve is quite steep at the moment."

"Sometimes, random errors of metadata are not there, which causes delays. These are essentially gaps in the information being passed to the job."

"There is no way for the cloud repositories to trigger Jenkins."

"It could be cheaper."

"In our case, we have several products built using Jenkins. It is quite difficult to navigate into the latest stable build in a given OS."

"The major drawback with Jenkins is the lack of support."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"There are different licensing options available, including a free limited-user license."

"It seems reasonable. Our IT team manages the licenses."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the pricing a five out of ten."

"My company uses the free version of GitLab, which is GitLab Community Edition. There is a licensed version also available for GitLab."

"Regarding pricing, I would rate GitLab as moderately priced, maybe around a seven or eight out of ten. It could be more flexible for clients but generally offers good value."

"GitLab's pricing is good compared to others on the market."

"As I work in a vast enterprise, I'm unsure about the licensing cost for GitLab. It's the management team that takes care of that."

More GitLab pricing and cost advice

"The solution is one of the lowest costs compared to competitors."

"It is free."

"Jenkins is a free solution, it is open source."

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

"Jenkins is an open-source tool."

"It is an open source."

"Jenkins is open-source, so it is free."

"It's free software with a big community behind it, which is very good."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user184734

Systems Administrator at Facebook

Jan 22, 2015

I generally find TeamCity a lot more intuitive than Jenkins.

Moving to TeamCity from Jenkins At work, we’re slowly migrating from Jenkins to TeamCity in the hope of ending some of our recurring problems with continuous integration. My use of Jenkins prior to this job has been almost strictly on a personal basis, although I pretty much only use Travis…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

22%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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 pricing of GitLab is reasonable, aligning with what I consider to be average compared to competitors.

See all answers

What needs improvement with GitLab?

Certain features in Jira are not available in GitLab, such as the functionality to have weights at the milestone and epic levels. Hopefully, these features will be resolved with work items in GitLa...

See all answers

How does Tekton compare with Jenkins?

When you are evaluating tools for automating your own GitOps-based CI/CD workflow, it is important to keep your requirements and use cases in mind. Tekton deployment is complex and it is not very e...

See all answers

What do you like most about Jenkins?

Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jenkins?

Jenkins is used in many companies to save money, especially within R&D divisions, by avoiding the expenses of proprietary tools.

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs GitLab

Compared 25% of the time

GitHub CoPilot vs GitLab

Compared 14% of the time

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs GitLab

Compared 7% of the time

AWS CodePipeline vs GitLab

Compared 5% of the time

Fortify Static Code Analyzer vs GitLab

Compared 2% of the time

More GitLab Competitors

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 15% of the time

Bazel vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

Bamboo vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

Tekton vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

TeamCity vs Jenkins

Compared 6% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

GitLab

May 2025

Download GitLab product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

May 2025

Download Jenkins product report

Also Known As

Fuzzit

No data available

Overview

GitLab is a complete DevOps platform that enables teams to collaborate and deliver software faster.

It provides a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle, from planning and development to testing, deployment, and monitoring.

With GitLab, teams can streamline their workflows, automate processes, and improve productivity.

GitLab

Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron.

Jenkins

Sample Customers

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

Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox

Buyer's Guide

GitLab vs. Jenkins

April 2025

Free Report: GitLab vs. Jenkins

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