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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

"If we compare GitHub’s $2 billion revenue to GitLab’s $579 million revenue for 2024, this is a 1:4 ratio, which is already pretty huge."

I think GitLab having a quarter of the revenue of GitHub is incredibly impressive, and makes me take GitLab a whole lot more seriously.

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Especially after they were ragging on french developers for "not understanding ROI".

And the final paragraph is the kicker: "I’ve nothing against GitLab, and their software might be pretty good. All we know is that they’re outsiders, while a lot of the tech market in Europe seems to think that betting on GitLab is the best go-to-market strategy."

Sounds like they haven't even evaluated gitlab? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. At least I've heard of Gitlab! If your advice is not to cooperate with outsiders or to even evaluate their offering, well... The French have amazing marketers, but they suck at writing coherent blog posts ;)

BTW, 2/0.579 = 3.45, so if you are going to do any rounding, you should round down to 3, not up to 4 :)

Do they have 1:4 ratio of expenses though

Its probably more like 1:2 or 1:3. GitLab has 2,300 employees, and is fully remote. They also take advantage of an international labor force being fully remote [0]. Github probably benefits from Microsoft's real estate portfolio, but they do have offices, they have almost 6k employees and probably a lot more corporate bureaucracy[1]

[0]:https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/

[1]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub

Revenues per empoyee:

- Github: 2 bil. revenue on 6K employees = 333K/employee

- Gitlab: 547 mil. revenue on 2300 employees = 237K/employee revenue

interesting, github is more efficient on that metric ... scale matters I susppose

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