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GitLab vs Spinnaker comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

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 Release Automation
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (9th), Build Automation (3rd), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (6th), Rapid Application Development Software (15th), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (6th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (2nd), Fuzz Testing Tools (2nd), DevSecOps (1st)
Spinnaker
Ranking in Release Automation
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of GitLab is 20.0%, down from 29.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spinnaker is 2.1%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Release Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
GitLab20.0%
Spinnaker2.1%
Other77.9%
Release Automation
 

Featured Reviews

BasilJiji - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Anurag Bandyopadhyay - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Development Engineer at Razorpay
Useful to create custom pipelines
Regarding areas for improvement, one significant issue is the lack of maker-checker flows to ensure that newly created pipelines are accurate and tested. We currently use an in-house abstraction over Spinnaker to verify pipeline specs, environment variables, etc. It would be beneficial if Spinnaker could offer this functionality within their product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is user-friendly, easy to use, and easy to administer."
"The solution is valuable for developers because it includes version controlling, pipelines, CI/CD, and integrations."
"It is very flexible and easy because you can store data on cloud."
"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."
"The most valuable features of GitLab are ease of use and highly intuitive UI and performance."
"GitLab is a very good solution because you can completely maintain your code and have a number of developers working on the same project."
"Overall, it's a great product and it does a good job."
"It is a speedy platform compared to the others I have used, and I have also enjoyed using the platform as this solution offers a good user experience."
"Spinnaker is used for automating a variety of deployment tasks, infrastructure, provisioning tasks, and all kinds of things."
"The tool's most valuable feature is its intuitive interface for converting existing Kubernetes specs into working pipelines. It's easy for anyone to deploy anything on any environment when they need to test or deploy for a specific merchant or use case. Instead of going into the specs and changing different variables, they can do it through the UI, which is very useful."
"The most valuable feature of Spinnaker is the rollback."
"There is a good community around the product that makes troubleshooting possible."
 

Cons

"The solution could improve by having better integration."
"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."
"The pricing model of GitLab is an issue for me."
"The solution should be more cloud-native and have more cloud-native capabilities and features."
"The integration and storage capabilities could be better."
"The tool should include a feature that helps to edit the code directly."
"It can be free for commercial use."
"The solution could improve by providing more integration into the CI/CD pipeline, an autocomplete search tool, and more supporting documentation."
"Regarding areas for improvement, one significant issue is the lack of maker-checker flows to ensure that newly created pipelines are accurate and tested. We currently use an in-house abstraction over Spinnaker to verify pipeline specs, environment variables, etc. It would be beneficial if Spinnaker could offer this functionality within their product."
"Spinnaker's configuration setup is too complicated and should be made easy."
"Log-wise, we need to understand why something has failed so that we can understand and try to fix it the moment the issue is reported. The solution could use more robust monitoring."
"Every time it goes to run a pipeline, it just generates a lot of data, and its database is not exactly tuned out of the box, meaning it is not tuned for high scalability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution."
"There are different licensing options available, including a free limited-user license."
"We are currently using the open-source version."
"The solution's pricing is acceptable."
"I don't mind the price because I use the free version."
"The solution is free."
"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."
"Spinnaker is an open-source product. The tool is completely free for users."
"Spinnaker is a free-to-use, open-source solution."
"The solution is open-source."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business39
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise50
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitLab?
I was using the free version of GitLab , but I think the price is comparative and not a major differentiator.
What needs improvement with GitLab?
Since GitLab [Private Offer Only] the main part is the Git part. With AI being available, I see one thing happening. For example, Claude Code allows people to connect Jira or ClickUp, and then they...
What is your primary use case for GitLab?
My basic use case for Gitlab was the ticket management, the wiki, the CI/CD pipeline, and the code repository. These four use cases form my core usage.
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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Overview

 

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
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Find out what your peers are saying about GitLab vs. Spinnaker and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.