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Comment by nalck | Hacker News Reader

GitLab has a fine interface and offers free private repositories. If it weren't for GitHub's network effect advantage, I'd use it for all my git projects.

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I'm also trying to use it more often, but I have to admit that it is significantly slower than GitHub.

Really love that they have free private repos though.

gitlab.com really is awfully slow, but I don't know how that reflects on smaller deployments.

Seems to work well on local servers at least.

Only .com is slow and we're working on it. Local installations should be fast.

What's the "Network effect" for private repos?

I'd imagine the network effect is non-existent for private repos, but for public repos it's huge. And then there's the issue of switching between Gitlab and Github for private/public projects.

That's essentially it. GitHub has won its role as the (meta)repository of public record. I suspect many stick with it over its competitors for this very reason.

Just because a repo starts out private, it doesn't mean it has to be private forever.

Exactly this. I generally begin my projects as private GitHub repos and then make them public once they have a MVP-quality demo of some sort.

I also make heavy use of GitHub's issues/milestones system, even on private repos, to keep myself organized. I'd probably use GitLab a lot more if I knew of an easy way to port issues and milestones over to GitHub when I decide to make a project public.

On a related note, can anyone recommend some good external issue tracking systems that integrates well with both GitLab and GitHub?

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