We performed a comparison between Gitlab and Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle comes out ahead of GitLab. Although both products have valuable features and can be estimated as high-end solutions, our reviewers found that GitLab’s price is higher and has uncertain long-term support.
"The most valuable features of GitLab are the CI/CD pipeline and code management."
"I have found the most valuable features of GitLab are the GitClone, GitPush, GitPull, GitMatch, GitMit, GitCommit, and GitStatus."
"GitLab is very well-organized and easy to use. Also, it offers most features that customers need."
"GitLab integrates well with other platforms."
"The most valuable features of Gitlab are integration with CIE and the ability to rapidly deploy solutions, projects, and applications. It is very easy to use, and there are no complaints."
"I like GitLab's security and SAS tools."
"The most important features of GitLab for us are issue management and all the CI/CD tools. Another aspect that I love about GitLab is the UI."
"This product is always evolving, and they listen to the customers."
"What's really nice about that is it shows a graph of all the versions for that particular component, and it marks out the ones that have a vulnerability and the ones that don't have a vulnerability."
"It's online, which means if a change is made to the Nexus database today, or within the hour, my developers will benefit instantly. The security features are discovered continuously. So if Nexus finds out that a library is no longer safe, they just have to flag it and, automatically, my developers will know."
"The most important features of the Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle are the vulnerability reports."
"Due to the sheer amount of vulnerabilities and the fact that my company is still working on eliminating all vulnerabilities, it's still too early for me to say what I like most about Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle. Still, one of the best functions of the product is the guidance it gives in finding which components or applications have vulnerabilities. For example, my team had a vulnerability or a CVE connected to Apache last week. My team couldn't find which applications had the vulnerability initially, but using Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle helped. My team deployed new versions on that same day and successfully eliminated the vulnerabilities, so right now, the best feature of Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle is finding which applications have vulnerabilities."
"It scans and gives you a low false-positive count... The reason we picked Lifecycle over the other products is, while the other products were flagging stuff too, they were flagging things that were incorrect. Nexus has low false-positive results, which give us a high confidence factor."
"The REST API is the most useful for us because it allows us to drive it remotely and, ideally, to automate it."
"You can really see what's happening after you've developed something."
"I like Fortify Software Security Center or Fortify SSC. This tool is installed on each developer's machine, but Fortify Software Security Center combines everything. We can meet there as security professionals and developers. The developers scan their code and publish the results there. We can then look at them from a security perspective and see whether they fixed the issues. We can agree on whether something is a false positive and make decisions."
"There was a problem with the build environment when we were looking at developing iOS applications. iOS build require Mac machines and there are no Mac machines provided by GitLab in their cloud. So to build for mobile iOS application, we needed to use our own Mac machine within our own infrastructure. If GitLab were to provide a feature such that an iOS application could also be built through GitLab directly, that would be great."
"The tool should include a feature that helps to edit the code directly."
"There is a need to improve or adopt AI into the ecosystem like a co-pilot, which Microsoft has done with GitHub."
"It should be used by a larger number of people. They should raise awareness."
"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."
"I rate the support from GitLab a four out of five."
"We have only seen a couple of issues on Gitlab, which we use for building some of the applications."
"The only thing our company is really waiting on in terms of features is the development of metrics."
"It could be because I need to learn more about Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle, but as a leader, if I want to analyze the vulnerability situation and how it is and the forecast, I'd like to look at the reports and understand what the results mean. It's been challenging for me to understand the reports and dashboards on Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle, so I'll need to take a course or watch some YouTube tutorials about the product. If Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle has documentation that could help me properly analyze the vulnerability situation and what the graphs mean, then that would be helpful. I need help understanding what each graph is showing, and it seems my company is the worst, based on the chart. Still, I need clarification, so if there were some documentation, a more extensive knowledge base, or a question mark icon you could hover over that would explain what each data on the graph means, that would make Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle better."
"Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle can improve the functionality. Some functionalities are missing from the UI that could be accessed using the API but they are not available. For example, seeing more than the 100 first reports or, seeing your comments when you process a waiver for a vulnerability or a violation."
"One area of improvement, about which I have spoken to the Sonatype architect a while ago, is related to the installation. We still have an installation on Linux machines. The installation should move to EKS or Kubernetes so that we can do rollover updates, and we don't have to take the service down. My primary focus is to have at least triple line availability of my tools, which gives me a very small window to update my tools, including IQ. Not having them on Kubernetes means that every time we are performing an upgrade, there is downtime. It impacts the 0.1% allocated downtime that we are allowed to have, which becomes a challenge. So, if there is Kubernetes installation, it would be much easier. That's one thing that definitely needs to be improved."
"Fortify's software security center needs a design refresh."
"It's the right kind of tool and going in the right direction, but it really needs to be more code-driven and oriented to be scaled at the developer level."
"We created the Wiki page for each team showing an overview of their outstanding security issues because the Lifecycle reporting interface isn't as intuitive. It is good for people on my team who use it quite often. But for a tech engineer who doesn't interact with it regularly, it's quite confusing."
"The user interface needs to be improved. It is slow for us. We use Nexus IQ mostly via APIs. We don't use the interface that much, but when we use it, certain areas are just unresponsive or very slow to load. So, performance-wise, the UI is not fast enough for us, but we don't use it that much anyway."
"It would be helpful if it had a more detailed view of what has been quarantined, for people who don't have Lifecycle licenses. Other than that, it's pretty good."
GitLab is ranked 6th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 70 reviews while Sonatype Lifecycle is ranked 5th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 43 reviews. GitLab is rated 8.6, while Sonatype Lifecycle is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sonatype Lifecycle writes "Seamless to integrate and identify vulnerabilities and frees up staff time". GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Bamboo, SonarQube, AWS CodePipeline and Snyk, whereas Sonatype Lifecycle is most compared with SonarQube, Black Duck, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, Checkmarx One and Mend.io. See our GitLab vs. Sonatype Lifecycle report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors and best Application Security Tools vendors.
We monitor all Software Composition Analysis (SCA) 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.
