GitHub was better even without these features than GitLab tho. GitLab UI is slow and un-intuitive.
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...
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.
And that goes down even further when self-hosting. We're hosting ours (700+ projects, a dozen active users, 40GB worth of repos, and a half dozen active CI Runners) on a $80 Linode with a dozen other internal services that are constantly being used and we see 400-700ms loads on most pages. The performance is fantastic, frankly. And the CI/CD is the best I've used (comparing against Jenkins, Bamboo, Travis, and Circle)
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.
What are you on about? They didn't mention any loyalty to a brand. They said qualitatively what they preferred about one product to another.
I mean, they could have added "in my opinion", but I don't think it's too hard to assume they're referring to their opinion and not unilaterally declaring their word as law?
I am just saying things like it is.
Another thing is better branch protection, more granular branch merging and review policies.
That's just from the top of my head.