GitLab Reviews

We have our CI/CD pipelines set up in GitLab. It is our code base. 

The solution makes the CI/CD pipelines easy to execute. 

The tool should include a feature that helps to edit the code directly. 

I have been using the product for two years. 

The solution is stable. 

I haven't reached out to them yet. 

GitLab's deployment is easy. 

GitLab is cheap. 

GitLab was mostly used for version control. All of the code was uploaded into GitLab and then shared across the company. We also used it for running CICD pipelines and automating those pipelines.

Basically, it was up to the mark. The solution did what it was supposed to do.

We had to write GitLab configuration files, commands and conditions, in a YML format. I would like configuration of a YML file to be done via UI rather than a code file. There should be support for code files, as well, but if there could be a UI for it and a little bit of documentation along with it, that would help.

I used this solution for two years.

The solution is stable. 

This is a scalable solution. We had around 200 users working with it. Two people are required for deployment and maintenance. 

The implementation was handled in-house. It shouldn't take a long time to implement because it's pretty basic stuff. It all depends on how much customization you want to have. 

My advice for others looking into this product is to go for it. GitLab is the future. There are some alternates, like Stash and Bitbucket, that have the same concept, but GitLab is one of the most widely used version control systems. It's easy to use.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of ten.

There are two primary functions. The first function is a Git-compliant source code repository, and the second function is a full-fledged CI/CD platform.

The CI/CD functionality as a whole is pretty helpful and nice to have. Their CI/CD engine is very mature. It's very comprehensive and flexible, and compared to other projects, I believe that GitLab is number one right now from that perspective.

They have had a Kubernetes integration built in, but they recently announced that in Version 16 they're going to strip out the legacy Kubernetes integration, and then introduce a new way of doing the integration. I don't really like the new way because it is pretty focused on the on-premise environment, but we're in a hybrid environment. The integration they're offering is not really a good fit for hybrid infrastructure and I was disappointed with that new feature. 

I work for a government-based institution in the US and government-based institutions are very strict about compliance and security. The new model GitLab is offering implies the connectivity will be initiated from the server side to the clients, meaning from Kubernetes back to GitLab, and that's not going to work in our space. We cannot allow traffic back from the cloud to on-prem, so that's going to be a compliance violation. I understand why they want to implement the feature, maybe it's going to be more solid, but it looks like they aren't taking into consideration hybrid environments and the security and compliance aspects. We will find a workaround, but we're still kind of disappointed. It'll generate a lot of additional work.

One feature that has been requested by our development team is a multi-level review of the pool request. When you maintain code and you've got a lot of contributors, a contributor can submit a change in the form of a pool request. There is a feature called merge request in GitLab for when you have a team of people who are supposed to approve a change, but Atlassian BitBucket has a more complete version of the same feature, which includes a multi-approval mechanism. For instance, if you have three people, you can create a rule for how changes should be approved. Maybe they should be approved by you and me and the third guy is not really important, or it could be approved by only you or me, or all three of us together. BitBucket has that flexibility and there is no such flexibility in GitLab.

I've been using GitLab for approximately four years. 

Overall, it's pretty stable. 

Scalability is not directly a feature of GitLab because GitLab is about storing your source code. Your storage can be organized in a way that makes it very scalable. For instance, we use the NetApp Store and we are not limited at all, so whenever we hit a disk space problem, we can simply extend the storage and give it more IOPs. However, the way you organize your storage is not GitLab's responsibility.

There are about 100 people currently involved with this solution at my company. 

Their customer service is very helpful. They're really good. I communicate with tons of different support clients and GitLab's support is one of the best. A lot of people don't like calling support because it's often useless or annoying, but I would rate GitLab's support as a ten out of ten. I haven't had any complications. 

Positive

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I don't remember having any issues related to the setup. 

There is an open-source edition and a commercial version. I've used both, but mostly I've used the commercial one. However, the open-source version is also very, very good. The commercial version is reasonably priced. It's about 20k annually. 

Checkmarx is a static analysis tool. GitLab offers, in turn, their own solution. They offer static analysis, dynamic analysis, and a lot of integration. They also offer integration with Checkmarx. There are a lot of features, actually, and plenty of tools. For the price, I think it's very comprehensive.

Compared to other products, for instance, Nessus, they're approximately at the same price level. I would put them all on the same level with approximately the same functionality, but GitLab is one of the best.

I would give this solution a ten out of ten. There are a couple of caveats, but compared to other products, GitLab is certainly the leading solution in the market right now. 

Our company is a partner and installs the solution for clients who manage their ACD and DevOps pipelines. 

We have 700 developers who use the solution, Microsoft's integration, and SharePoint for uploading. 

The solution's service delivery model is fantastic. 

Integrations connect to the cloud server and are easy to use. 

The solution offers good security and stability. 

The solution should again offer an on-premises deployment option. In the past, an on-premises solution was offered that used to sync with the cloud-based solution. We would like that option to return because many industries are interested in offline uploads and pathways. 

The solution should integrate Web 3.0 and provide better system transactions.

I have been using the solution for three years. 

The solution is very stable. 

The initial setup is simple. 

You can immediately start using the solution as soon as you subscribe. 

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

Many options are available in the database but a few uncommon options that our company actually liked have been phased out. If those options return, the solution will be fantastic. 

Our company subscribes to the premium tier which includes security. It would be nice to offer security as an add-on at lower tiers so more users have access to these advanced features. 

I rate the cost an eight out of ten. 

I recommend the solution and rate it an eight out of ten. 

The most valuable functionality of GitLab, for me, is the DevOps. Besides the normal source control based on Git, I find the Auto DevOps features most important in the solution.

As GitLab is not perfect, what needs improvement in the solution is the Wiki feature of the groups or the repertories because currently, it's not searchable by default. You'll need an indexing service such as Elasticsearch to make it searchable, and that requires too much work, so for me, it's the main feature that should be improved in GitLab.

In the next version of the solution, from the top of my head, the documentation could be improved. Besides the Wiki, it would be good if there's documentation that would be automatically generated based on the code repository. In other words, there should be some tutorials from GitLab for developers in the next release.

I've been using GitLab for almost three years.

GitLab is a pretty stable solution, and on a scale of one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I'm rating its stability a ten. My team just learned some details about the configuration of GitLab, so it's now tuned up, and right now, there's no problem with the stability of the platform.

In terms of GitLab scalability, based on its features, it's supposed to scale easily enough geographically, but my company hasn't tried scaling it yet. It shouldn't be a big problem to scale the solution.

In terms of the technical support for GitLab, I mainly use the forums and support sites of the solution. I don't use the direct technical support line of GitLab.

The initial setup for GitLab is simple mainly because of all its features that allow you to make a startup instance of the solution simpler and quicker, and that's very good.

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.

We evaluated Azure DevOps, but we liked the style of how things are built up inside GitLab for the end-user and the developer more compared to Azure DevOps, though Azure DevOps is also a very good choice.

I'm using the latest version of GitLab.

My company has a small team and only has six users of GitLab.

On a scale of one to ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best, my rating for GitLab, in general, is nine. My company likes the solution very much, especially over Azure DevOps.

I would recommend GitLab for others to use.

My company is a customer of GitLab.

We are using it for pipelines, continuous integration, and continuous deployment. 

In terms of deployment, it can be a cloud solution, but we have installed it on our site on Azure.

GitLab is very useful for pipelines, continuous integration, and continuous deployment. It is also stable.

Its price should be improved. It is very expensive.

Based on what I know so far, its integration with Kubernetes is not so good. We have to develop many things to make it work. We have to acquire third-party components to work with Kubernetes. 

From the DevOps perspective, the way we deploy applications is too complicated. It needs to be simplified. It is very development-oriented, and it works very well for DevOps, but when you are at the group level, you want it to be simple and more oriented towards the process. The automation process to deploy is not a very good part of GitLab.

I have been using this solution for three or four years.

It is stable.

Its scalability is fine. We have 200 developers in our organization. 

We have been doing okay on our own. We are able to find support inside our company.

Its initial setup is okay. We did the installation in three months, but it was very slow and complicated to develop the continuous deployment during these three years for each application. We had to develop pipelines for multiple development languages.

We are quite well organized now, but it took a long time to think about which pipeline to use with GitLab. We now have five pipelines. We have the infrastructure pipeline, the middleware pipeline, the image pipeline, the security pipeline, and the application pipeline.

We have a team of 10 people for its deployment. They are admins and managers.

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. 

We are using the Azure Cloud solution, and we are thinking of trying the Azure DevOps solution this year. 

I would recommend this solution to others. The product is fine, but you have to do the integration with different pipelines.

I would rate GitLab a seven out of 10.

We are using it for building mobile applications and web applications. I am supporting the code in GitLab. It is only for giving access to my development team, and I just see what merge requests are coming.

I like GitLab from the CI/CD perspective. It is much easier to set up CI/CD and then integrate with other tools.

In the free version, when a merge request is raised, there is no way to enforce certain rules. We can't enforce that this merge request must be reviewed or approved by two or three people in the team before it is pushed to the master branch. That's why we are exploring using some agents.

I have been using this solution for more than six months.

It seems stable.

I didn't find any scalability issues so far. We have around 50 members who use this solution. Around 20 of them use it on a daily basis.

One of my colleagues got in touch with them, and his response was that their technical support was not that great. The details that they provided for the question were not that great.

We also use GitHub. Earlier GitLab was more favored, but now GitHub has everything that is there in GitLab. If GitHub is offering more, then there might be chances of switching to that. I am not attached to either of these solutions. If things are working better for me in GitHub, I will move to GitHub.

It is simple. You just create one repo and then give access. It takes maybe 5 to 10 minutes.

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.

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate GitLab an eight out of ten.

We have a normal use case to build source code and our agenda and then try to deploy it. The deployment is not specifically automated, it is semi-automated. So it is normal. We create an artifact, try to build it, and then deploy it onto the application server. It's not fully automated. 

At this point, I think the features are declining. 

We like that we can create branches and then the branches can be reviewed and you can mesh those branches back. You can independently work with your own branch, you don't need to really control the core of other people. 

There could be more features in GitLab, but we are as of now not using the full-fledged feature set. 

Another good feature is the code review, which also helps us with peer review. It helps in giving part of the code and giving back whatever the branch that the developer is working on. It can then be merged once it is thoroughly reviewed. Those are certain things that I think are helpful from a developer's point of view. It provides or mandates quantitative code into the master.

We do reviews as I also work with some of the leadership teams. Leadership teams generally focus on statistics, metrics, or some sort of dashboard. They would like to have the ability to categorize these things. They would like to have a very high-level view. That would help. Someone who is not really a developer, but a leadership team. They are always interested in statistics or metrics features. That is something I would see imbedded into GitLab. That would help someone who is from the outside take a view and understand how qualitative the code is, because they cannot definitely dive in and look at the code, and they will not be able to understand all the details. At a high level, if they want to see and understand, at least they will have some confidence about how the projects are going on.

I have been using GitLab for two years. 

The stability is good. I never had any issues. Stability-wise, I'm comfortable with it. 

Scalability-wise it is very scalable as well. Based on the code volume, there is a scope for improvement. I never had issues with scalability.

Technical support depends on licensing. We haven't reached out that frequently because it is stable and we don't see any issues. I don't recall anything that we had any particular challenge that we had to reach out immediately to GitLab and then get the answer quicker at any point in time.

I wasn't here for the deployment but the deployment takes around 10 minutes. 

Only a few aspects will take close to five minutes. 

I would rate GitLab an eight out of ten. 

GitLab provides some sort of static analysis part. That is what I understand, but I never tried it. I would like to see static analysis also embedded in GitLab. That would also help us. If there's something that it does internally by GitLab and then that is already tied up with your pipeline and then it can tell you that you're coding is good or your code is not great. Based on that, it would pass or fail. That should be streamlined. I would think that would help to a greater extent, in terms of having one solution rather than depending on multiple vendors.