GitHub’s new offer closely matches that from GitLab

Competition is good for the end user, but ISTM that Microsoft bought the biggest player in the space so that they could drown the competition in the bathtub and monopolize the market. It's a smart play from Microsoft's point of view, but FTC should never have permitted the acquisition in the first place and should prosecute them for illegal dumping now.

Don't really have the time to do a complete write-up, but for what it's worth I've completely moved my company from GitHub to GitLab within the past year. We found the group and project hierarchy to work very well for organizing our clients and their projects, and we've made extensive use of your CI/CD.

The only real complaint I have is about the Auto DevOps feature you released. We're currently using this for a number of smaller projects, and we've found the documentation around customizing deployments severely lacking. We ended up just reading through the Auto DevOps repository since it was clearer and more complete than any online documentation, which eventually allowed us to work through all of the issues we were having.

Other than that, it has been a wonderful experience. Thanks for a great product!

Looking through that comparison, I find it funny that "time tracking" is touted as a feature.

My grand-boss might love the idea but the fact that GitHub is missing time tracking is a blessing as a developer.

Making developers track their time is hostile. Development is not something you should clock in and out of. A time-box in JIRA or GitHub shouldn't replace management being aware of what their team(s) are working on and how their progress is.

It too often turns into a stick to beat developers with.

There are all kinds of better metrics by which to hold developers accountable. Tracking time just puts developers off from improving code or refactoring. If you write bad code it's not your time that suffers, it's the next developer who has to work on that section.

The comparison states that "With GitLab, you get even more features than GitHub Team" and then lists code owners, multiple issue and PR assignees, or standard support. All these features are included in GitHub Team for $4 per month, so this whole section of the blog post is misleading.

Also, you may want to point out that GitLab only offers annual billing, so the minimum charge on GitLab is $48. Some of my hobby projects only run a couple of months, so GitHub is the better choice.

Hey, also don't have a time for a full review, but had one comment. I've been a pretty passionate user of GitLab for 2+ years and really loved the industry-leading integrated CI/CD. I have found that page load times on both GitLab and GitHub, however, are pretty bad, with GitLab being the worst. Many administrative tasks, such as logging in -> finding repo -> checking a ci/cd test -> merging / releasing the branch, take 10+ page loads, and each one is quite slow. I ended up moving my personal projects to sourcehut simply because pages are more lightweight and server response times are faster. If GitLab could spend some time reducing the number of pages required for common tasks (not asking for a single-page-app!), and could reduce page load times as much as possible (I know this isn't trivial with Rails), I think that would greatly reduce the friction I feel when using the produce.

Is it possible to submit replies via Fediverse or mail? Asking since I do not have a Twitter account and do not want to create one.

I don't have a blog to blog on yet, and you are likely looking for that to get some positive backlinks, but here are my two cents anyway.

I use both for work - and gitlab by preference:

* On the whole they are now close enough that I don't worry about the choice

* Both are slow. Silly slow. A 2 second target for page loads is horrific. Jumping around a file structure and exploring blame is really really painful; but 90% of the time I'm on the pipelines page and its so so so slow. Its actually faster for me to have my pipelines webhook a private server for a faster dash.

* GitLab is better for CI/CD. Easier, more sensible. I use it all the time; I set new clients up on it.

* Gitlab is better for k8's - several clients use it and love it.

* Search sucks on them both. They both give a paginated list when what I always want is a place in repo / filetype / etc. filter, post initial search (i.e, I'm looking for loadModule in webpack, I want to ignore tests (when I didn't know which was the test folder before searching), and jump between definition and usage, as well as find out if there is any documentation. Its not worth doing each individually. I want all at once)

* API's are really slow. GitLab is probably worse here. My default webpage (localhost home page) is a dashboard of quick links and widgets. One of those widgets shows my failing pipelines. It takes 6 seconds on a good day. I bypassed it (as above) to let me be more responsive. I didn't have to bother bypassing it w/GitHub

* On my NAS I maintain images of GitLab hosts and backups of all my repos. I have an image of the self-hosted gitlab we had at a previous (it closed) company. Being able to fall back to self-hosted is the oft-touted godsend, but being able to restart a retired self-hosted has literally made me and the others involved several thousand each (twice old clients have wanted a one off job. GitLab is the core of testing and deploying infrastructure).

I've wanted to do a deep dive into Github vs Gitlab for projects. But I'm a bit hesitant to have that on my blog. Unfortunately most places I've been pushing for anything other than Github is not well received.

That being said I've been using GitLab for a several years.

Right now is a perfect example of why I use GitLab. I just started a role, and I'm working to improving pull request and CI/CD visibility. This is automatically baked into GitLab. To the point I just copy a template for all my projects. But now I'm writing a bunch of custom integrations, and talking to a number of different third party services. Even with all the extra work it feels less polished than GitLab.

With Kubernetes, Serverless, and prometheus metrics integration. Gitlab hand's down provides the best visibility into a release or sprint from what I've seen. There are pain points, but I have very little in the way of complaints.

You guys have also been great for the open source community. I got a Gold open source license and am using it for a number of projects.

I've converted a number of people to GitLab, now we just need to find places that will let us use it.

Several people have already mentioned that gitlab is slow, so very slow. I've seen replies in this thread that make it obvious that this is being tracked, and that you're well-aware of it.

That said I can't help recalling the last time the topic came up, seven months ago even then it was old-news:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995889

If the site hasn't gotten faster in the past year I think it is obvious that this is not a priority in any real sense. Despite claims to the contrary.

Gitlab has a great core-offering, the gitlab runners were wonderful when they came out. But it seems like new features are constantly being piled on top of each release, (time tracking?!) when it might benefit users to step back a little bit and focus upon the core.

I can only assume developers get recognition by new-features, not core-improvements.

Doing a campaign/survey where you pay people to compare yourself to your direct competition on your blog, on the areas you chose? Really objective.

Also, this topic is about the article linked, not about your survey.

As feedback, I would say Github is a better company since it doesn't sink this low on their tactics. They just focus on making their product better.

When will GitLab release the issue edit history feature? It's a very important feature for every group

For self-hosted instances you can use Advanced Global Search https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/search/advanced_global_searc... to do this. Please note that this requires installation of Elastic Search. It used to be a paid feature but I think we recently open sourced it.

I want to second this. I use GitLab for personal projects and have used their CI extensively.

My work uses Github and has all the repos hosted there. I tried to start using Github Actions (or whatever it is called?) about a month ago, and just couldn't make sense of it.. does it provision servers from Docker images/docker-compose files? or is it only a "carcass" where I have to add an additional server? can I do everything "as code" or do I have to mingle with the web console ?

After spending about 2 hours tinkering I gave up.

It is great, except there STILL is no reasonable way of finding a particular image in the registry. You can't order by date uploaded! Only by name. Which means the order is out of whack as soon as you go from version 9 to version 10.

And to make it worse, paging is extremely slow, so it could take an hour of paging into the middle of the list to find the name of the image you're looking for. Even if the image was uploaded 1 minute ago it could be in the middle page.

Thankfully I don't have to do this very often, but it's a horrible experience when needed.

For similar reasons deleting unneeded images takes forever and is not feasible.

Yeah, Apple, Google, Amazon - the usual culprits - are the competition, not small fish like GitLab.

Open source .NET, SQL server running on Linux, VS Code, Github, NPM, WSL, tons of opensource on Azure.

I think you are right, and Microsoft is after winning developers, not fighting with Gitlab.

I think this is a winning strategy and we will see even more moves in this direction. Probably more acquisitions, more open sourcing products, more free stuff, more cross platform tools targeted at developers.

A developer by himself doesn't have much decision power, but if more developers prefer something, companies will follow and use Microsoft's products.

Developer mindshare. Mindshare at all.

Compare to Oracle. When Sun had been trying to win mindshare with OpenSolaris, what did Oracle do? It killed it. It also effectively killed any chance of winning that mindshare. I'm still salty about that.

Open source is a business tool. A tool for building trust and mindshare.

As long as VCs fuel GL to stay alive against Microsoft's pockets (Microsoft benefits from it in multiple ways even if GitHub isn't profitable, GitLab has no other revenue stream)

Interesting that you'll risk moving your dev ops workflow because of a single feature that GitHub doesn't even do well.

GitLab Developer Evangelist here.

They are commitments. Each feature has its own issue for the engineering effort behind moving it to Core with various milestones based on team capacity and complexity of the move.

You can track each with the table in the post that relates the feature to “GitLab issue” that represents the move.

GitLab PM here for the Package stage. We announced that the Package Registry offering will be included in GitLab Core.

This means that for npm, Maven, NuGet, Conan and any future formats, you will be able to:

- Establish GitLab as a private repository - Authenticate using your GitLab credentials, personal access or job token - Publish packages to GitLab - Pull packages from GitLab - Search for packages hosted on GitLab - Access an easy-to-use UI that displays package details and metadata and allows you to download any relevant files

It does take a bit of work to migrate the code. We are currently investigating what work is required and will have a better sense of timing once the investigation is complete. We are hoping to have this complete in the next few months.

You can follow along in the issue here: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2867.

>They're looking for an acquisition, maybe an IPO, and exploiting users (and even on-prem customers!) is clearly going to be part of that game plan.

Could you elaborate?

In what way are you aware that Gitlab is:

- seeking acquisition (makes sense that they would, I am just seeking some evidence to confirm the suspicion). To be fair, a large part of why I use GitLab is because it is not owned by Microsoft. Hence I am interested in whether or not GitLab will stay independent or "sell out". Certainly I'd lean on the latter, but again, seeking evidence of any planning on their part to seek acquisition.

- exploiting users (or how it would be part of the "game plan" -- I can see exploiting user data they've gathered while users use their free service... but that's capitalism. Is there any other way they currently or might in the future exploit users?)

Here's one recent attempt: https://github.com/braydonf/gpk

GitLab Developer Evangelist here.

You can host NPM registries in your GitLab projects. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/npm_registry/

Moving to Core (free AND open source) soon along with 17 other features: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/30/new-features-to-cor...

It definitely looks like to be a competitor

I do not understand this kind of brand loyalty.

Even if you're not interested in using Gitlab yourself, the competition and user migrations are clearly turning Github into a better service. You benefit from Microsoft's need to court those users, even if you never touch Gitlab.

Just take the newly reduced prices and free features in your favorite service and be happy.

I'm not sure about that. I've self hosted gitlab for the past four years and have had no issues performance wise and the UI feels pretty much the same as for github in terms of bein intuitive.

I fail to see how Gitlab's UI is not intuitive, for the most part 90% of the GitHub functionality is in 3 menus.

It does get complicated when you start adding kubernetes clusters and more of the Gitlab gold features, but even then I think its well managed.

As far as speed goes, it is slower than GitHub, but has gotten a lot better over the last year. Just browsing around right now it loads within 1 second for pretty much anything besides pull requests.

Hey! GitLab employee here. The speed of the site has been on our radar too, we have a handbook page [1] detailing our metrics and our goals. Ultimately we want to have a speed index of less than 2 seconds for .com, but we know we aren't quite there yet.

As for the UI being unintuitive, I'm sorry to hear that. Everyone has different UI preferences so it's understandable. If you want, we're holding a competition right now [2] for anyone who writes a review of GitLab vs GitHub if there are any specific features within GitHub's UI that you like better!

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/performance/

[2] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-tea...

No it wasn't. Gitlab CI is such a great thing and well integrated with the main product. Github is nowhere near.

Another thing is better branch protection, more granular branch merging and review policies.

That's just from the top of my head.

The thread is 1 hour old.

I was doing iteration office hours https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5e-6R5NWl0 :)