FOSSA vs GitLab comparison

FOSSA and GitLab are both solutions in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category. FOSSA is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.0, while GitLab is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.6. FOSSA holds a 3.4% mindshare in SCA, compared to GitLab’s 4.5% 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

2,099 Views
1,373 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

GitLab

Read 82 GitLab reviews

2,021 Views
1,688 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: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

FOSSA vs. GitLab

March 2025

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Helped 842,651 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

FOSSA

Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

9th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

GitLab

Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

5th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Security Tools (8th), Build Automation (1st), Release Automation (2nd), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (7th), Rapid Application Development Software (12th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (2nd), Fuzz Testing Tools (2nd), DevSecOps (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of FOSSA is 3.4%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of GitLab is 4.5%, down from 5.2% 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

Proactively mitigate deployment vulnerabilities with seamless dependency tracking

Before using FOSSA, we could only identify issues after deployment in the Cloud Run. Now, with FOSSA, we identify dependency issues or vulnerabilities during the CI phase itself. This proactive approach has eliminated the need to search the internet for solutions, as FOSSA provides updated recommendations automatically. This has made the process more efficient and mitigated risks before deployment.

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Gaurav Chandel

AWS DevOps/ Site Reliability Engineer at Tata Consultancy

Boosted productivity with automated pipelines and seamless collaboration

There are some challenges with repository file management as GitLab may struggle to manage larger files. Improvements could be made regarding size management and file partitioning. Also, the UI has remained the same for a couple of years and could benefit from an update with AI features and better customization.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The support team has just been amazing, and it helps us to have a great support team from FOSSA. They are there to triage and answer all our questions which come up by using their product."

"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 is easy to use and set up, provides relatively accurate results, and doesn't require armies of people to get value from its use."

"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."

"What I really need from FOSSA, and it does a really good job of this, is to flag me when there are particular open source licenses that cause me or our legal department concern. It points out where a particular issue is, where it comes from, and the chain that brought it in, which is the most important part to me."

"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."

"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."

"Being able to know the licenses of the libraries is most valuable because we sell products, and we need to provide to the customers the licenses that we are using."

More FOSSA pros

"They incorporate new features every September, and they have introduced their own code editor and AI features."

"GitLab's best features are continuous integration and fast deployment."

"Continuous integration with deployment is very powerful, which is a significant reason for migrating from TFS to GitLab."

"I have found the most valuable features of GitLab are the GitClone, GitPush, GitPull, GitMatch, GitMit, GitCommit, and GitStatus."

"The scalability is good."

"The most valuable aspects of GitLab are the ability to create branches, merge branches, and compare branches to resolve code conflicts."

"CI/CD is valuable for me."

"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 want the product to include binary scanning which is missing at the moment. Binary scanning includes code and component matching through dependency management. It also includes the actual scanning and reverse engineering of the boundaries and finding out what is inside."

"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."

"On the legal and policy sides, there is some room for improvement. I know that our legal team has raised complaints about having to approve the same dependency multiple times, as opposed to having them it across the entire organization."

"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."

"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."

"The solution provides contextualized, actionable, intelligence that alerts us to compliance issues, but there is still a little bit of work to be done on it. One of the issues that I have raised with FOSSA is that when it identifies an issue that is an error, why is it in error? What detail can they give to me? They've improved, but that still needs some work. They could provide more information that helps me to identify the dependencies and then figure out where they originated from."

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

"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."

More FOSSA cons

"As a partner, sometimes it's difficult to get support. They have a really complicated procedure for their support."

"There is room for improvement in GitLab Agents."

"It can be free for commercial use."

"The licensing model could be improved to be more accommodating in terms of user numbers and costs."

"As GitLab is not perfect, what needs improvement in the solution is the Wiki feature of the groups or the repertories because currently, it's not searchable by default. You'll need an indexing service such as Elasticsearch to make it searchable, and that requires too much work, so for me, it's the main feature that should be improved in GitLab. In the next version of the solution, from the top of my head, the documentation could be improved. Besides the Wiki, it would be good if there's documentation that would be automatically generated based on the code repository. In other words, there should be some tutorials from GitLab for developers in the next release."

"The integration could be slightly better."

"I would like to have some features to support peer review."

"GitLab could consider introducing a code-scanning tool. Purchasing such tools from external markets can incur charges, which might not be favorable. Integrating these features into GitLab would streamline the pipeline and make it more convenient for users."

More GitLab cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"This is an open-source solution."

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

"I'm not aware of the licensing costs because those were covered by the customer."

"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."

"GitLab's pricing is good compared to others on the market."

"The solution is based on a subscription model and is reasonably priced."

"This product is not very expensive but the price can be better."

More GitLab pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

29%

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Educational Organization

26%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

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?

FOSSA does not show the exact line of code with vulnerabilities, which adds time to the process as we have to locate these manually. Some other tools like Check Point or SonarQube provide exact lin...

See all answers

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 pricing of GitLab is reasonable, aligning with what I consider to be average compared to competitors.

See all answers

What needs improvement with GitLab?

Certain features in Jira are not available in GitLab, such as the functionality to have weights at the milestone and epic levels. Hopefully, these features will be resolved with work items in GitLa...

See all answers

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Compared 8% of the time

AWS CodePipeline vs GitLab

Compared 6% of the time

Tekton vs GitLab

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

FOSSA

March 2025

Download FOSSA product report

Buyer's Guide

GitLab

March 2025

Download GitLab product report

Also Known As

No data available

Fuzzit

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.

FOSSA

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.

GitLab

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

March 2025

Free Report: FOSSA vs. GitLab

Find out what your peers are saying about FOSSA vs. GitLab and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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