FOSSA vs GitLab comparison

FOSSA and GitLab are both solutions in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category. FOSSA is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.0, while GitLab is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.3. FOSSA holds a 3.7% mindshare in SCA, compared to GitLab’s 4.8% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of FOSSA users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of GitLab users who would recommend it.

FOSSA

Read 15 FOSSA reviews

2,420 Views
1,585 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

GitLab

Read 75 GitLab reviews

2,526 Views
1,945 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

FOSSA

GitLab

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

GitLab and FOSSA compete in the software development and deployment category. GitLab seems to have the upper hand in CI/CD pipeline management and integration, while FOSSA stands out in open-source license compliance and legal collaboration.

Features: GitLab offers effective continuous integration, code review, and branch management, facilitating collaborative development. It integrates DevOps and version control, providing user-friendly deployment and security features. FOSSA specializes in open-source management and compliance, with a robust policy engine automating license scanning and offering quick feedback on security issues.

Room for Improvement: GitLab faces integration challenges, especially with non-Kubernetes environments, and seeks advancements in metrics and third-party tool integration. Users also express concerns over pricing and cloud-native features. FOSSA needs to enhance user experience, dashboard functionalities, security scans, and project categorization, with improved policy documentation as frequently requested.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: GitLab supports various deployment options, including public, private, on-premises, and hybrid clouds, with community-based support needing improved responsiveness. FOSSA, primarily deploying in public and on-premises settings, has knowledgeable support but could improve onboarding and documentation for better user experiences.

Pricing and ROI: GitLab offers free and premium tiers, with the higher tiers seen as costly for smaller teams. Users consider the pricing reasonable but note significant cost jumps between tiers. FOSSA's competitive pricing, although not cheap, provides significant ROI, reducing compliance workloads and offering a licensing model that aligns with user utilization patterns.

To learn more, read our detailed FOSSA vs. GitLab Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

FOSSA vs. GitLab

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

FOSSA

Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

10th

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

GitLab

Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

5th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Security Tools (11th), Build Automation (1st), Release Automation (2nd), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (10th), Rapid Application Development Software (12th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (2nd), Fuzz Testing Tools (2nd), DevSecOps (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of FOSSA is 3.7%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GitLab is 4.8%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Featured Reviews

Hanumanth Ramsetty

Software Engineer at Tech Mahindra Limited

Oct 24, 2024

Proactively mitigate deployment vulnerabilities with seamless dependency tracking

In our current project, we are using FOSSA as part of our CI/CD pipeline. It is used to scan our projects to ensure that our dependencies are up to date and do not introduce vulnerabilities to our code Before using FOSSA, we could only identify issues after deployment in the Cloud Run. Now, with…

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Corné den Hollander

Product Owner at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Sep 15, 2022

Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage

It's more related to the supporting layer of features, such as issue management and issue tracking. We tend to always use, for example, Jira next to it. That doesn't mean that GitLab should build something similar to Jira because that will always have its place, but they could grow a bit in those kinds of supporting features. I see some, for example, covering ITSM on a DevOps team level, and that's one of the things that I and my current client would find really helpful. It's understandably not going to be their main focus and their core, and whenever you are with a company that needs a bit more advanced features on that specific topic, you're probably still going to integrate with another tool like Jira Service Management, for example. However, some basic features on things like that could be really helpful. In terms of additional features, nothing comes to mind. One of the potential pitfalls is to keep adding new features and functionalities. They can just improve some of the existing features to make it high-end, top-quality. I don't have any substantial experience with agile planning. I don't know the industries GitLab is in, and I don't know why they make decisions like this, but as a customer, I would rather see them invest in improving the basic agile planning functionalities rather than adding, for example, portfolio planning features. That's because if I'm going to do portfolio planning, I probably will also need a lot of business users. I'm not sure if I want them in GitLab, I'd rather have them in Jira collaborating with me on portfolio planning. That's way better fitted for that type of work.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The most valuable feature is definitely the ease and speed of integrating into build pipelines, like a Jenkins pipeline or something along those lines. The ease of a new development team coming on board and integrating FOSSA with a new project, or even an existing project, can be done so quickly that it's invaluable and it's easy to ask the developers to use a tool like this. Those developers greatly value the very quick feedback they get on any licensing or security vulnerability issues."

"FOSSA provided us with contextualized, easily actionable intelligence that alerted us to compliance issues. I could tell FOSSA exactly what I cared about and they would tell me when something was out of policy. I don't want to hear from the compliance tool unless I have an issue that I need to deal with. That was what was great about FOSSA is that it was basically "Here's my policy and only send me an alert if there's something without a policy." I thought that it was really good at doing that."

"I found FOSSA's out-of-the-box policy engine to be accurate and that it was tuned appropriately to the settings that we were looking for. The policy engine is pretty straightforward... I find it to be very straightforward to make small modifications to, but it's very rare that we have to make modifications to it. It's easy to use. It's a four-category system that handles most cases pretty well."

"One of the things that I really like about FOSSA is that it allows you to go very granular. For example, if there's a package that's been flagged because it's subject to a license that may be conflicts with or raises a concern with one of the policies that I've set, then FOSSA enables you to go really granular into that package to see which aspects of the package are subject to which licenses. We can ultimately determine with our engineering teams if we really need this part of the package or not. If it's raising this flag, we can make really actionable decisions at a very micro level to enable the build to keep pushing forward."

"Policies and identification of open-source licensing issues are the most valuable features. It reduces the time needed to identify open-source software licensing issues."

"FOSSA suggests solutions for dependency mismatches."

"I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results."

"The most valuable feature is its ability to identify all of the components in a build, and then surface the licenses that are associated with it, allowing us to make a decision as to whether or not we allow a team to use the components. That eliminates the risk that comes with running consumer software that contains open source components."

More FOSSA pros

"It is very useful for reviews. We are using branch merging operations and full reset operations. It is also very useful for merging our code and tracking another branch. The graph diagrams of Git are very useful. Its interface is straightforward and not too complex for us."

"GitLab is a solution for source code management, container registry, pipelines, testing, and deployment."

"We're only using the basic features of GitLab and haven't used any advanced features. The solution works fine, so that's what we like about GitLab. We're party using GitHub and GitLab. We have a GitHub server, while we use GitLab locally or only within our team, and it works okay. We don't have any significant problems with the solution. We also found the straightforward setup, stability, and scalability of GitLab valuable."

"It is very flexible and easy because you can store data on cloud."

"I like that you can use GitLab as a double-sided solution for both DevOps and version management. It's a good product for working in these two areas, and the user interface makes it easy to understand."

"We use GitLab in the new project for CI/CD, integration, and deployment."

"This product is always evolving, and they listen to the customers."

"Their CI/CD engine is very mature. It's very comprehensive and flexible, and compared to other projects, I believe that GitLab is number one right now from that perspective."

More GitLab pros

Cons

"I wish there was a way that you could have a more global rollout of it, instead of having to do it in each repository individually. It's possible, that's something that is offered now, or maybe if you were using the CI Jenkins, you'd be able to do that. But with Travis, there wasn't an easy way to do that. At least not that I could find. That was probably the biggest issue."

"Security scanning is an area for improvement. At this point, our experience is that we're only scanning for license information in components, and we're not scanning for security vulnerability information. We don't have access to that data. We use other tools for that. It would be an improvement for us to use one tool instead of two, so that we just have to go through one process instead of two."

"I would like the FOSSA API to be broader. I would like not to have to interact with the GUI at all, to do the work that I want to do. I would like them to do API-first development, rather than a focus on the GUI."

"One thing that can sometimes be difficult with FOSSA is understanding all that it can do. One of the ways that I've been able to unlock some of those more advanced features is through conversations with the absolutely awesome customer success team at FOSSA, but it has been a little bit difficult to find some of that information separately on my own through FAQs and other information channels that FOSSA has. The improvement is less about the product itself and more about empowering FOSSA customers to know and understand how to unlock its full potential."

"FOSSA does not show the exact line of code with vulnerabilities, which adds time to the process as we have to locate these manually."

"For open-source management, FOSSA's out-of-the-box policy engine is easy to use, but the list of licenses is not as complete as we would like it to be. They should add more open-source licenses to the selection."

"On the dashboard, there should be an option to increase the column width so that we can see the complete name of the GitHub repository. Currently, on the dashboard, we see the list of projects, but to see the complete name, you have to hover your mouse over an item, which is annoying."

"I would like more customized categories because our company is so big. This is doable for them. They are still in the stages of trying to figure this out since we are one of their biggest companies that they support."

More FOSSA cons

"It's more related to the supporting layer of features, such as issue management and issue tracking. We tend to always use, for example, Jira next to it. That doesn't mean that GitLab should build something similar to Jira because that will always have its place, but they could grow a bit in those kinds of supporting features. I see some, for example, covering ITSM on a DevOps team level, and that's one of the things that I and my current client would find really helpful. It's understandably not going to be their main focus and their core, and whenever you are with a company that needs a bit more advanced features on that specific topic, you're probably still going to integrate with another tool like Jira Service Management, for example. However, some basic features on things like that could be really helpful."

"The integration and storage capabilities could be better."

"I would like to see security increased in the future. A secure environment is very important."

"It would be really good if they integrated more features in application security."

"The user interface could be more user-friendly. We do most of our operations through the website interface but it could be better."

"The pricing model of GitLab is an issue for me."

"GitLab would be improved with the addition of templates for deployment on local PCs."

"We'd always like to see better pricing on the product."

More GitLab cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free."

"FOSSA is a fairly priced product. It is not either cheaper or expensive. The pricing lies somewhere in the middle. The solution is worth the money that we are spending to use it."

"FOSSA is not cheap, but their offering is top-notch. It is very much a "you get what you pay for" scenario. Regardless of the price, I highly recommend FOSSA."

"Its price is reasonable as compared to the market. It is competitively priced in comparison to other similar solutions on the market. It is also quite affordable in terms of the value that it delivers as compared to its alternative of hiring a team."

"The solution's cost is a five out of ten."

"GitLab is an open-source solution."

"As I work in a vast enterprise, I'm unsure about the licensing cost for GitLab. It's the management team that takes care of that."

"The solution's standard license is paid annually. They have changed the pricing model and it used to be better. There is a free version available."

"The price is okay."

"We are using the free version of GitLab."

"The initial setup cost is excellent and you can add the premium features later."

"GitLab is comparatively expensive, but it provides value because it's feature-rich."

"I don't mind the price because I use the free version."

More GitLab pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

28%

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Healthcare Company

Educational Organization

28%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about FOSSA?

I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FOSSA?

The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free. You have to pay for the features you need, which I think is fair. If you want to get value for free...

See all answers

What needs improvement with FOSSA?

If you have thousands of applications, organizing them all into teams or tags is challenging. There is a point where you start using FOSSA at a very large scale, and the user interface needs to adj...

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What do you like most about GitLab?

I find the features and version control history to be most valuable for our development workflow. These aspects provide us with a clear view of changes and help us manage requests efficiently.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitLab?

The solution is free.

See all answers

What needs improvement with GitLab?

In the next release, I would like to see GitLab expand its integration capabilities to include platforms like DigitalOcean, which developers widely use for cloud infrastructure. Enhancing CI/CD aut...

See all answers

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

AWS CodePipeline vs GitLab

Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

FOSSA

November 2024

Download FOSSA product report

Buyer's Guide

GitLab

October 2024

Download GitLab product report

Also Known As

No data available

Fuzzit

Learn More

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FOSSA

GitLab

Overview

Up to 90% of any piece of software is from open source, creating countless dependencies and areas of risk to manage. FOSSA is the most reliable automated policy engine for legal teams to maintain license compliance, security to fix vulnerabilities, and engineering to improve code quality across the entire software supply chain. As the only developer-native open source management platform, FOSSA fully integrates with your existing CI/CD pipeline to provide complete visibility and context earlier in the software development lifecycle. For the first time, teams can collaboratively shift left and audit, analyze, control, and remediate license issues and vulnerabilities right in their existing workflows.

GitLab is a complete DevOps platform that enables teams to collaborate and deliver software faster.

It provides a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle, from planning and development to testing, deployment, and monitoring.

With GitLab, teams can streamline their workflows, automate processes, and improve productivity.

Sample Customers

AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent

1. NASA 2. IBM 3. Sony 4. Alibaba 5. CERN 6. Siemens 7. Volkswagen 8. ING 9. Ticketmaster 10. SpaceX 11. Adobe 12. Intuit 13. Autodesk 14. Rakuten 15. Unity Technologies 16. Pandora 17. Electronic Arts 18. Nordstrom 19. Verizon 20. Comcast 21. Philips 22. Deutsche Telekom 23. Orange 24. Fujitsu 25. Ericsson 26. Nokia 27. General Electric 28. Cisco 29. Accenture 30. Deloitte 31. PwC 32. KPMG

Buyer's Guide

FOSSA vs. GitLab

October 2024

Free Report: FOSSA vs. GitLab

Find out what your peers are saying about FOSSA vs. GitLab and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

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