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Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Gitlab has been leading the way for a while now, consistently introducing new features that Github eventually copies. It's a real testament to the power of competition. I first started using Gitlab due to free private repositories, which Github eventually added. Gitlab had free built-in CI/CD first, and Github eventually followed. I'm still on Gitlab these days despite Github catching up, and still enjoying features like organizations with subfolders that Github lacks.

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Except Github Actions is leaps and bounds above Gitlab CI.

Yeah also a doubter, you can get to pretty DRY workflows with GitLab extends, caching is great, built in artifact repositories (including image registry), workflows/rules on when to build (i.e. run certain tasks specifically off MRs), granular approval rules, review environments and the paid for version has pretty awesome security primitives that are really easy to incorporate (sast/dast/container scanning et al.). I may be a bit biased but having kicked the tyres on actions my feeling is GL is miles ahead on the CI front.

Ha ha, no way. Very basic things (like caching) are riddled with bugs and (undocumented) limitations. Documentation is poor compared to GL, there are much less features and UI is confusing at best. GH needs to do better if they want to compete here.

Really?

I have consistently heard the opposite.

Actions has more polish but is not as feature rich is what I have heard.

It really is, they one-upped Gitlab, and you can tell there is a clear difference in resources between the two companies. Yay competition! I especially like how you can run parallel builds on Windows, Mac, and Linux with one line of code with GitHub actions.

What’s nice about Git as a distributed VCS is I can use both GitHub and Gitlab and get the best of both worlds very easily. I win either way, and neither can lock me in (you know Microsoft would do it if they could, but they can’t). Therefore we see actual legitimate competition, where one has to constantly improve to outdo the other. I wish more things worked that way.

>neither can lock me in

That's true for the core git piece, but if you're a big enough org the CI/CD features, or issues, or pages, etc, could effectively lock you in.

It can only be true if you had experience with Gitlab CI 5 years ago and compare with current Github Action offering. There is no way a person who actually build CI pipelines in Gitlab and Github today can call Github a winner.

In addition to the above, GitLab Pages continues to be easier to setup and use (on GitLab.com) than GitHub Pages.

GitLab pages started with the incredible idea that you could provide your own docker container and use the CI to build using whatever tools you want while github only supported jekyl at the time.

These all sound like features that GitHub also had, but Gitlab needed to offer for free to gain users, rather than a technological superiority of Gitlab over GitHub. I don't think it's correct to interpret that as "Gitlab leading the way".

Note: I've preferred Gitlab, for exactly this reason

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