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GitLab vs Spinnaker comparison

 

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
91
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (7th), Build Automation (1st), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (4th), Rapid Application Development Software (11th), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (4th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (2nd), Fuzz Testing Tools (2nd), DevSecOps (1st)
Spinnaker
Ranking in Release Automation
11th
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 May 2026, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of GitLab is 25.3%, down from 32.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spinnaker is 2.0%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Release Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
GitLab25.3%
Spinnaker2.0%
Other72.7%
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

"GitLab's source control is excellent."
"CI/CD is very good. The version control system is also good. These are the two features that we use."
"I recommend GitLab for DevOps engineers."
"This is a scalable solution. We had around 200 users working with it."
"GitLab's best feature is Actions."
"The most valuable features of GitLab are ease of use and highly intuitive UI and performance."
"GitLab has better support, and its features are superior compared to Jenkins."
"The source-code repository is great, I really like the pipelines, and the stability is good."
"The most valuable feature of Spinnaker is the rollback."
"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."
"There is a good community around the product that makes troubleshooting possible."
"Spinnaker is used for automating a variety of deployment tasks, infrastructure, provisioning tasks, and all kinds of things."
 

Cons

"Atlassian offers more products than GitLab. GitLab offers source control management, version control and collaboration between developers. Atlassian offers features on top of this as well as more integration points for developers."
"GitLab's Windows version is yet not available and having this would be an improvement."
"In the next release, I would like to see GitLab expand its integration capabilities to include platforms like DigitalOcean, which developers widely use for cloud infrastructure. Enhancing CI/CD automation features specifically tailored for DigitalOcean would be beneficial."
"The pricing model of GitLab is an issue for me."
"I believe GitLab can be improved by making integration with other platforms a little easier."
"The documentation is confusing."
"The solution should be more cloud-native and have more cloud-native capabilities and features."
"GitLab can improve the integration with third-party applications. It could be made easier. Additionally, having API control from my application could be helpful."
"Spinnaker's configuration setup is too complicated and should be made easy."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"GitLab is highly priced for smaller teams, but it's okay if considering a user base of thousands."
"It is very expensive. We can't bear it now, and we have to find another solution. We have a yearly subscription in which we can increase the number of licenses, but we have to pay at the end of the year."
"This is an open-source solution."
"GitLab is a free solution to use."
"In total, I believe we have more than 300 licenses spread over about 100 users, though I can't comment on the costs involved."
"We are currently using the open-source version."
"There are different licensing options available, including a free limited-user license."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the pricing a five out of ten."
"The solution is open-source."
"Spinnaker is a free-to-use, open-source solution."
"Spinnaker is an open-source product. The tool is completely free for users."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
10%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise46
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitLab?
The setup cost for GitLab is minimal since the team has its own minimal resource balancing. The costing falls into an intermediate stage and is impactful across all results within the team. It allo...
What needs improvement with GitLab?
There are many improvements that GitLab can implement, such as addressing the issue of caching. Currently, when I have multiple tasks to merge or attempt multiple merges, the CI/CD and overall GitL...
What is your primary use case for GitLab?
My main use case for GitLab is as a version control system that we are using. Currently, I am working on an end-to-end AI pipeline, and I have deployed my whole code using GitLab so that all things...
What needs improvement with Spinnaker?
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 ov...
What is your primary use case for Spinnaker?
Spinnaker's main use case is deployment. We use it to create custom pipelines instead of manually deploying our HAN files. This allows us to deploy different services for staging, production, and o...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Fuzzit
No data available
 

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: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.