GitLab vs Jenkins comparison

GitLab and Jenkins are both solutions in the Build Automation category. GitLab is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.6, while Jenkins is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.1. GitLab holds a 17.0% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 11.0% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of GitLab users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Jenkins users who would recommend it.

GitLab

Read 82 GitLab reviews

6,733 Views
5,509 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 93 Jenkins reviews

4,563 Views
3,948 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

GitLab

Jenkins

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Jenkins and GitLab are prominent tools competing in the CI/CD automation category. GitLab seems to have the upper hand with its integrated CI/CD capabilities and strong version control features, streamlining the development workflow compared to Jenkins' extensive plugin reliance.

Features: Jenkins is known for its robust community support, extensive plugins, and flexibility, making it customizable and scalable for automation. It integrates with various development tools and supports multiple languages. GitLab offers a comprehensive platform with built-in CI/CD functionalities, excellent code repository management, and features like merge requests that streamline workflows.

Room for Improvement: Jenkins users wish for a more polished UI, stability enhancements for plugins, and better cloud integration. Improvement in authentication handling and streamlined plugin management are also sought after. GitLab users suggest better integration with tools like AWS, improved post-deployment monitoring, and a more user-friendly GUI. Enhancing documentation is another common request for both.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Jenkins provides flexibility across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments, supported by a strong open-source community. GitLab supports multiple environments and is noted for its straightforward hybrid deployment capabilities. While GitLab's customer support is beneficial, enhanced documentation could further improve the developer experience.

Pricing and ROI: Jenkins is primarily free and open-source, making it cost-effective, with optional commercial support available. It offers significant ROI by reducing reliance on paid CI tools. GitLab offers both free and paid plans, with enhanced features in the paid tiers. While some find GitLab’s pricing high, its extensive capabilities provide value at the enterprise level, presenting challenges for smaller teams compared to Jenkins' open-source nature.

To learn more, read our detailed GitLab vs. Jenkins Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

GitLab vs. Jenkins

January 2025

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Helped 838,640 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

GitLab

Ranking in Build Automation

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Security Tools (8th), Release Automation (2nd), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (8th), Rapid Application Development Software (12th), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (5th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (2nd), Fuzz Testing Tools (2nd), DevSecOps (3rd)

Jenkins

Ranking in Build Automation

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GitLab is 17.0%, down from 18.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 11.0%, down from 14.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

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.

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Dinesh-Patil

Consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

A highly-scalable and stable solution that reduces deployment time and produces a significant return on investment

The dashboard needs to be improved. Though the access management and authentication functionalities are present, the dashboard and UI could be more user-friendly. The product has many plug-ins. Users have to go through the documentation to be able to use the product. The UI must be more user-friendly. The information should be available in the dashboard itself. The users shouldn’t have to refer to the documentation. When a user hovers over the elements on the dashboard, it should reveal information about them.

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

"It's a great toolbox where the CI/CD pipeline is the fundamental component, but there are so many other features that you can pull from, which makes it a very powerful tool. My current client is using AWS, and they can, of course, use AWS CodePipeline, but GitLab is much more mature than that, and it also gives you the freedom to decide to go to another platform or have a multi-cloud strategy and things like that. That freedom for me is also very valuable."

"The CI/CD process is very efficient."

"The most valuable feature of GitLab is the ability to upload scripts and make changes when needed and then reupload them. Additionally, the solution is user-friendly."

"GitLab offers a good interface for doing code reviews between two colleagues."

"The most valuable features of GitLab are the review, patch repo, and plans are in YAML."

"I have had no problem with the stability of the solution."

"For us, Gitlab's most valuable feature is the integration with Cypress. We're using Cypress as an automation tool, so we're using GitLab as a tool for running in parallel."

"Git hosting has an integration with ACD which is why we liked this solution in the first place."

More GitLab pros

"Different types of jobs, such as Pipeline, Build, Freestyle, Maven, etc."

"Jenkins is the most widely used development tool, so there are many plugins and it's easy to integrate. There is a large user base to provide community support, which I find very valuable. If I need to find a better way to do something, I can always get help from the community. Automation is about thinking outside of the box, and other users are constantly adding new plugins."

"Jenkins has a lot of built-in packages and tools."

"When we have manual tasks, we have to depend on multiple technical teams. With Jenkins, we can bring all the technologies together by the click of a button. We can see results without having to depend on different teams. Jenkins makes life easy for the database and DevOps teams."

"Has a good interface, is reliable and saves time."

"The most valuable features of Jenkins are its ease of use and good plugins available. You are able to connect to a lot of solutions."

"It's very easy to learn."

"The auto-schedule feature is valuable. Another valuable feature is that Jenkins does not trigger a build when there is no change in any of the systems. Jenkins also supports most of the open-source plug-ins."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"The solution could improve by providing more integration into the CI/CD pipeline, an autocomplete search tool, and more supporting documentation."

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

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

"While GitLab is a great tool for developers, it lacks project planner features. Roadmaps and Gantt charts in GitLab are not as advanced as in Jira, and changing start and end dates is more laborious in GitLab."

"I'm new to GitLab, so I would appreciate more documentation about the code and commands."

"I would like to see static analysis also embedded in GitLab. That would also help us. If there's something that it does internally by GitLab and then that is already tied up with your pipeline and then it can tell you that you're coding is good or your code is not great. Based on that, it would pass or fail. That should be streamlined. I would think that would help to a greater extent, in terms of having one solution rather than depending on multiple vendors."

"Even if I say I want some improvement, they will say it is already planned in the first quarter, second quarter, or third quarter. That said, most everything is quite improved already, and they're improving even further still."

"Some of the scripts that we encountered in GitLab were not fully functional and threw up errors."

More GitLab cons

"The documentation on plugin development could be better: more examples. "

"Jenkins should adopt the Pipeline as Code approach by building a deployment pipeline using the Jenkins file."

"I would like to have an integrated dashboard on top of it and a better UX to look at. The dashboard could be better in terms of integration with other tools. We should be able to have a single pane of glass across all the tools that we use where Jenkins is the pipeline. This can be a very good upgrade to it."

"Jenkins could improve by adding the ability to edit test automation and make time planning better because it is difficult. It should be easier to do."

"It would be helpful if they had a bit more interactive UI."

"Jenkins is not an easy solution to use and the configuration is not simple. They can improve the solution by adding a graphical interface that is more user-friendly."

"Sometimes you have Jenkins restarting because of OOM errors."

"It could be cheaper."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is free."

"GitLab is highly priced for smaller teams, but it's okay if considering a user base of thousands."

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

"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."

"We are currently using the open-source version."

"In terms of the pricing for GitLab, on a scale of one to five, with one being expensive and five being cheap, I'm rating pricing for the solution a four. It could still be cheaper because right now, my company has a small team, and sometimes it's difficult to use a paid product for a small team. You'd hope the team will grow and scale, but currently, you're paying a high license fee for a small team. I'm referring to the GitLab license that has premium features and will give you all features. This can be a problem for management to approve the high price of the license for a team this small."

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

"This is an open-source solution."

More GitLab pricing and cost advice

"The solution is one of the lowest costs compared to competitors."

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

"It's free software with a big community behind it, which is very good."

"We are using the freeware version of Jenkins."

"It is a free product."

"We use the tool's open-source version which is free. There is an enterprise version which is expensive but comes with better support."

"In our company, we do pay for the licensing of the solution."

"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There are no costs or licensing."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user184734

Systems Administrator at Facebook

Jan 22, 2015

I generally find TeamCity a lot more intuitive than Jenkins.

Moving to TeamCity from Jenkins At work, we’re slowly migrating from Jenkins to TeamCity in the hope of ending some of our recurring problems with continuous integration. My use of Jenkins prior to this job has been almost strictly on a personal basis, although I pretty much only use Travis…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

29%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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?

There are missing search features, particularly when searching repositories or applying filters. Additionally, I have encountered issues with the deployment of CI/CD pipelines, especially dealing w...

See all answers

How does Tekton compare with Jenkins?

When you are evaluating tools for automating your own GitOps-based CI/CD workflow, it is important to keep your requirements and use cases in mind. Tekton deployment is complex and it is not very e...

See all answers

What do you like most about Jenkins?

Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jenkins?

Jenkins is used in many companies to save money, especially within R&D divisions, by avoiding the expenses of proprietary tools.

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs GitLab

Compared 34% of the time

GitHub CoPilot vs GitLab

Compared 9% of the time

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs GitLab

Compared 8% of the time

AWS CodePipeline vs GitLab

Compared 6% of the time

Fortify Static Code Analyzer vs GitLab

Compared 2% of the time

More GitLab Competitors

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 13% of the time

Bamboo vs Jenkins

Compared 11% of the time

Bazel vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

AWS CodePipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

Tekton vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

GitLab

February 2025

Download GitLab product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

February 2025

Download Jenkins product report

Also Known As

Fuzzit

No data available

Overview

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

Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron.

Jenkins

Sample Customers

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

Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox

Buyer's Guide

GitLab vs. Jenkins

January 2025

Free Report: GitLab vs. Jenkins

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