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 16.6% mindshare in BA, compared to Jenkins’s 10.4% 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

6,080 Views
4,974 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Jenkins

Read 93 Jenkins reviews

4,156 Views
3,557 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: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

GitLab vs. Jenkins

March 2025

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Helped 845,040 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 (9th), Release Automation (2nd), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (7th), 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

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GitLab is 16.6%, down from 18.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 10.4%, down from 13.8% 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.

Read full review

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

"GitLab's source control is excellent."

"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."

"The most valuable feature of GitLab is the automatic merging of code."

"It scales well."

"The code merging capability is something that we use very frequently."

"The tool helps to integrate CI/CD pipeline deployments. It is very easy to learn. Its security model is good."

"The solution makes the CI/CD pipelines easy to execute."

More GitLab pros

"I love Jenkins. I like that you work on anything, and you make anything. Jenkins is very important for my team. I am satisfied with the product."

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

"Jenkins' most valuable feature is Pipeline."

"GitHub linking is pretty good. We have a deployment application where we can run our tests and add various variables to be passed as assertions to those tests. This is pretty fluid with Jenkins."

"We really appreciate that this solution is plug and play. When coding in the version control system, this product completes the build process automatically."

"This is a great integration tool and very powerful."

"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."

"The most valuable feature of Jenkins is its open source."

More Jenkins pros

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."

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

"It is a little complex to set up the pipelines within the solution."

"Technologies are always changing. Nowadays, new things like serverless computing and workload management have emerged. We have noticed a few gap items for faster service delivery. For example, we do user interface testing in the latest team and automate it using some tools. Recently, we integrated a tool with user interface testing, which can simulate a multi-user environment. So, we would like to see more integration with different platforms."

"The solution could be faster."

"The integration could be slightly better."

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

"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."

More GitLab cons

"Partition security for the workflow of projects is not yet an option."

"It can be improved by including automated mobile reporting integrations."

"They need to improve their documentation."

"The major drawback with Jenkins is the lack of support."

"We cannot change the ownership of any directory or file or any kind of directory."

"The solution's UI can use a facelift and the logs can use more detailed information."

"There are some difficulties when we need to execute the DB script."

"Jenkins is an old product, and we encounter performance issues and slow response. Also, some of the plugins are not stable."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is very expensive. We can't bear it now, and we have to find another solution. We have a yearly subscription in which we can increase the number of licenses, but we have to pay at the end of the year."

"Its price is fine. It is on the cheaper side and not expensive. You have to pay additionally for GitLab CI/CD minutes. Initially, we used the free version. When we ran out of GitLab minutes, we migrated to the paid version."

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

"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."

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

"This 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."

"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."

More GitLab pricing and cost advice

"Jenkins is an open-source platform."

"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."

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

"It could be cheaper because there are many solutions available in the market. We are paying yearly."

"It is free."

"The tool is open-source."

"Some of the add-ons are too expensive."

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

26%

Financial Services Firm

12%

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?

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

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 29% of the time

GitHub CoPilot vs GitLab

Compared 13% 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 15% of the time

Bazel vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

Bamboo vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

Tekton vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

AWS CodePipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 6% of the time

More Jenkins Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

GitLab

March 2025

Download GitLab product report

Buyer's Guide

Jenkins

March 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

March 2025

Free Report: GitLab vs. Jenkins

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