GitLab vs Jenkins comparison

GitLab and Jenkins are both solutions in the Build Automation category. GitLab is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3, while Jenkins is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.2. GitLab holds a 12.2% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 9.1% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of GitLab users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 88% of Jenkins users who would recommend it.

GitLab

Read 86 GitLab reviews

18,203 Views
4,187 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 92 Jenkins reviews

3,400 Views
3,332 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

GitLab

Jenkins

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

Jenkins and GitLab both compete in the CI/CD tools category. Jenkins holds an advantage due to its vast library of plugins and strong community support, while GitLab offers an integrated platform with robust security features.

Features: Jenkins is celebrated for its extensive plugin ecosystem that allows for significant flexibility and customization. It provides a wide array of plugins for automating complex tasks across different platforms. GitLab combines source control and CI/CD in one platform, providing a seamless experience with strong security measures. It includes built-in tools that support comprehensive DevOps processes.

Room for Improvement: Jenkins users seek improvements in its outdated interface and plugin stability. Enhancing cloud features and integration capabilities is also desired. GitLab could improve tool integration, expand documentation, and enhance UI for easier navigation. Users would appreciate more flexibility in pipeline configurations and stronger security features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Jenkins offers versatile deployment options across on-premises, public, and private cloud environments, with strong community support. GitLab matches this versatility but provides more structured support options, which are beneficial for enterprises needing dedicated assistance. Both have supportive communities, with GitLab often commended for its support infrastructure.

Pricing and ROI: Jenkins is primarily open-source and free, with an enterprise version offering additional features at a cost, making it cost-effective for companies avoiding proprietary tools. GitLab operates on a tiered pricing model with a free community edition. Though its premium tiers are costlier, they are appealing for enterprise needs due to their abundant features. Both provide good value, with Jenkins leading in cost efficiency due to its open-source nature.

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

Buyer's Guide

GitLab vs. Jenkins

September 2025

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Helped 868,759 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

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Security Tools (11th), 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 (3rd), DevSecOps (1st)

Jenkins

Ranking in Build Automation

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GitLab is 12.2%, down from 17.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 9.1%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
GitLab	12.2%
Jenkins	9.1%
Other	78.7%

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 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.

Read full review

Annamalai Pts

DevOps Engineer at Tech Mahindra Limited

Streamlined CI/CD pipelines with powerful integration and an easy setup

I use Jenkins as a CI/CD tool. We create pipelines using Jenkins, with stages for Maven builds, Docker image builds, SonarQube integration, and deploying the image to a Kubernetes cluster, AWS EKS Jenkins has made the developers' work very easy. They commit to the remote repository, and…

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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 CI/CD pipeline with Helm has significantly improved deployment speed and efficiency."

"GitLab has better support, and its features are superior compared to Jenkins."

"Git merging allows us to track the details of how and who has done what; this is the best feature which is useful for all companies."

"GitLab offers a good interface for doing code reviews between two colleagues."

"GitLab's source control is excellent."

"I like GitLab's security and SAS tools."

"The scalability is good."

"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."

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."

"Jenkins is a CI/CD tool and is the most robust tool."

"Jenkins is stable, user-friendly, and helps with continuous integration. As of today, I can't see any tool that's better than Jenkins."

"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."

"I can install Jenkins for integration from multiple developers and automate application delivery, staging, and production environments."

"The simplicity of Jenkins and the evolving ecosystem of Jenkins are most valuable. Today, you do not have to write a pipeline from scratch. The library functionality of Jenkins helps you to bring all those in ready-made, and you also get the best practices for them. That is a great feature of Jenkins, and that is why it is being used significantly."

"The deployment of traditional Jenkins is easy."

"We use Jenkins to automatically build Python binaries into several OS's i.e. OS X, Ubuntu, Windows 32-bit and Windows 64-bit."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"The user interface could be more user-friendly. We do most of our operations through the website interface but it could be better."

"GitLab doesn't have AWS integration. It would be better to have integration with other container management environments beyond Kubernetes. It has very good integration with Kubernetes, but it doesn't have good integration with, for example, AWS, ETS, etc."

"The documentation could be improved to help newcomers better understand things like creating new branches."

"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."

"It can be free for commercial use."

"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 would like more Agile features in the Premium version. The Premium version should have all Agile features that exist in the Ultimate version. IBM AOM has a complete Agile implementation, but in GitLab, you only have these features if you buy the Ultimate version. It would be good if we can use these in the Premium version."

More GitLab cons

"We cannot change the ownership of any directory or file or any kind of directory."

"There are a lot of things that they can try to improvise. They can reduce a lot of configurations. It is currently supporting Groovy for scripting. It would be really good if it can be improvised for Python because, for most of the automation, we have Python as a script. It would be good if can also support Python. We have a lot of Android builds. These Android builds can be a part of Jenkins. It can have some plug-ins or configurations for Android builds. There should also be some internal matrix to check the performance. We also want to have more REST API support, which is currently not much in Jenkins. We are not able to get more information about running Jenkins. More REST API support should be provided."

"Performance-wise. This needs to be improved. Not only performance-wise, some functionality or some features can be added to Jenkins."

"For this solution to be a 10, it has to be a lot more stable. Maybe the public version of Jenkins is stable, but in our case it's not stable."

"It would be helpful if they had a bit more interactive UI."

"Integrating Jenkins with other tools or solutions has presented some challenges. For instance, when attempting to integrate Jenkins with Kubernetes, I encountered numerous errors, which took several days to resolve. In Jenkins, adding a feature typically involves incorporating the repository feature separately. Jenkins lacks built-in Git repository functionality, necessitating an external Git repository to store Jenkins manifests."

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

"There are some difficulties when we need to execute the DB script."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"The open-source version is very good and the commercial version is reasonably priced."

"GitLab is an open-source solution."

"GitLab is cheap."

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

"The initial setup cost is excellent and you can add the premium features later."

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

More GitLab pricing and cost advice

"Jenkins is an open-source tool."

"Jenkins is an open-source platform."

"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There is not a license required to use the solution because it is open-source."

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

"Jenkins is open source and free."

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

"Jenkins is a free open-source server."

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

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	35
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	42

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	56

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?

We are currently using general GitLab, not GitLab Premium.

See all answers

What needs improvement with GitLab?

GitLab needs to improve the CI/CD functionality because it is not compatible with Jenkins and other tools, as it is not that efficient. Security-wise, we have security features enabled in GitLab fo...

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 38% of the time

GitHub CoPilot vs GitLab

Compared 12% of the time

TeamCity vs GitLab

Compared 5% of the time

Tekton vs GitLab

Compared 5% of the time

Bamboo vs GitLab

Compared 2% of the time

More GitLab Competitors

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 14% of the time

JFrog Pipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

TeamCity vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

Bazel vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

Tekton vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

GitLab

September 2025

Download GitLab product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

September 2025

Download Jenkins product report

Also Known As

Fuzzit

No data available

Overview

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

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

September 2025

Free Report: GitLab vs. Jenkins

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