We performed a comparison between GitHub and GitLab based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Result: Based on the reviews provided by users, GitHub and GitLab both seem to provide comprehensive and practical software development and project management tools. Long-time users find GitLab's customer service and responsiveness less reliable than GitHub's because they haven't had enough time to develop in that direction.
"The most valuable aspects of GitHub are version control and parallel development. I also appreciate the forking part, which allows us to release a specific set of features to the environment."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"We are finding GitHub is very stable."
"It's beneficial for managing multiple tasks and controlling versions of your product."
"The product has a good UI. It's simple and easy to access, and technical help is easily available. The two-factor authentication security is another valuable feature."
"GitHub's source code management is top-notch. It's easy to inspect changes and visualize code and differences. Their action system is comprehensive in terms of making changes and automation."
"GitHub's version control is valuable."
"I find GitHub very user friendly."
"It is scalable."
"The best thing is that as the developers work on separate tasks, all of the code goes there and the other team members don't have to wait on each other to finish."
"I have found the most valuable features of GitLab are the GitClone, GitPush, GitPull, GitMatch, GitMit, GitCommit, and GitStatus."
"GitLab is very useful for pipelines, continuous integration, and continuous deployment. It is also stable."
"The solution's most valuable feature is that it is compatible with GitHub. The product's integration capabilities are sufficient for our small company of 35 people."
"It speeds up our development, it's faster, safer, and more convenient."
"I like GitLab's security and SAS tools."
"The solution makes the CI/CD pipelines easy to execute."
"The solution should have less integration with the AI part, but it needs to add features with other automation tools so that it can be easily integrated."
"The security for this solution could be tightened up and improved."
"The storage for this solution could be improved."
"I would want to see some form of code security scanning implemented."
"I think it would be valuable to have more security. Some of the data is very open to everyone."
"The solution needs some more controls for deleting code."
"Though I haven't done much research, GitHub lacks in providing more functions like GitLab."
"Scalability is an area with a shortcoming, because of which it has room for improvement."
"The only thing our company is really waiting on in terms of features is the development of metrics."
"It would be better if there weren't any outages. There are occasions where we usually see a lot of outages using GitLab. It happens at least once a week or something like that. Whatever pipelines you're running, to check the logs, you need to have a different set of tools like Argus or something like that. If you have pipelines running on GitLab, you need a separate service deployed to view the logs, which is kind of a pain. If the logs can be used conveniently on GitLab, that would be definitely helpful. I'm not talking about the CI/CD pipelines but the back-end services and microservices deployed over GitLab. To view the logs for those microservices, you need to have separate log viewers, which is kind of a pain."
"The tool should include a feature that helps to edit the code directly."
"In the free version, when a merge request is raised, there is no way to enforce certain rules. We can't enforce that this merge request must be reviewed or approved by two or three people in the team before it is pushed to the master branch. That's why we are exploring using some agents."
"GitLab's Windows version is yet not available and having this would be an improvement."
"We are having a few problems integrating with Jira at the moment, which is something that our IT department is investigating."
"For as long as I have used GitLab, I haven't encountered any major limitations. However, I think that perhaps the search functionality could be better."
"There is a need to improve or adopt AI into the ecosystem like a co-pilot, which Microsoft has done with GitHub."
GitHub is ranked 9th in Application Security Tools with 74 reviews while GitLab is ranked 6th in Application Security Tools with 70 reviews. GitHub is rated 8.6, while GitLab is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of GitHub writes "Beneficial version control and continuous integration, but guides would be helpful". On the other hand, the top reviewer of GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". GitHub is most compared with Snyk, AWS CodeCommit, Fortify on Demand, Bitbucket and SonarQube, whereas GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, SonarQube, Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline and Tekton. See our GitHub vs. GitLab report.
See our list of best Application Security Tools vendors.
We monitor all Application Security Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
