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GitLab pros and cons

Vendor: GitLab

4.2 out of 5

75 reviews
97% willing to recommend

999 followers

Pros & Cons summary

GitLab enhances development with efficient branch management, CI/CD integration, and advanced code review to boost speed and collaboration. New features are frequently added based on user feedback, but challenges include complex pricing, lack of certain integrations like AWS, and limited built-in security tools. Users face integration difficulties and find the documentation lacking. Nevertheless, it remains a crucial platform for improving development workflows.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

GitLab provides robust tools for review, branch merging, and continuous integration, enhancing collaborative development and deployment processes.

Users appreciate GitLab for its effective integration with other platforms and tools, which facilitates seamless workflows and CI/CD processes.

GitLab's continuous updates and responsiveness to customer feedback contribute to its evolution as a comprehensive DevOps tool.

GitLab is recognized for its stability and scalability, making it a reliable choice for handling source code management and DevOps practices across various project sizes.

GitLab supports a variety of development needs with features like issue tracking, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing, which streamline version control and project management.

CONS

GitLab requires improved AWS and other container management integration beyond Kubernetes.

Static analysis and better integration into CI/CD pipelines are desired for streamlined code verification.

Better integration with project management tools like Jira is needed, alongside enhanced documentation for new users.

More cloud-native capabilities and features, including support for platforms like DigitalOcean, are recommended.

GitLab should consider including code-scanning tools internally to streamline pipeline processes and reduce external costs.

GitLab Pros review quotes

Corné den Hollander

Product Owner at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Sep 15, 2022

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.

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Prasant Pokarnaa

Delivery Head - DevOps at Datamato Technologies

Mar 3, 2023

The solution has an established roadmap that lays out its plans for upgrades over the next two to three years.

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AM

Anton Makarevich

DevOps/Cloud Lead at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees

Oct 14, 2022

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.

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Udaysimha Nerella

Specialist Data Analysis vehicle safety at Cubeware

Oct 27, 2022

We're only using the basic features of GitLab and haven't used any advanced features. The solution works fine, so that's what we like about GitLab. We're party using GitHub and GitLab. We have a GitHub server, while we use GitLab locally or only within our team, and it works okay. We don't have any significant problems with the solution. We also found the straightforward setup, stability, and scalability of GitLab valuable.

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reviewer1579953

Manager at Zensar Technologies

Jun 6, 2022

I like that you can use GitLab as a double-sided solution for both DevOps and version management. It's a good product for working in these two areas, and the user interface makes it easy to understand.

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RP

System and Storage Engineer at Harsco Corporation

Jul 13, 2020

We like that we can create branches and then the branches can be reviewed and you can mesh those branches back. You can independently work with your own branch, you don't need to really control the core of other people.

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reviewer2254248

Principle Product Manager at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Mar 12, 2024

The important feature is the entire process of versioning source code maintenance and easy deployment. It is a necessity for the CI/CD pipeline.

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Filipe-Marcelino

Head of Digital Solutions at Bravantic

Aug 5, 2022

The most valuable functionality of GitLab, for me, is the DevOps. Besides the normal source control based on Git, I find the Auto DevOps features most important in the solution.

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reviewer1322850

Technical Lead at a mining and metals company with 51-200 employees

Jan 10, 2021

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

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CT

DevOps Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Nov 7, 2022

The user interface is really good so that helps with huge teams who need to collaborate.

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GitLab Cons review quotes

Corné den Hollander

Product Owner at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Sep 15, 2022

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.

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Prasant Pokarnaa

Delivery Head - DevOps at Datamato Technologies

Mar 3, 2023

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.

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AM

Anton Makarevich

DevOps/Cloud Lead at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees

Oct 14, 2022

I don't really like the new Kubernetes integration because it is pretty focused on the on-premise environment, but we're in a hybrid environment.

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Free Report: GitLab Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about GitLab. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.

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Udaysimha Nerella

Specialist Data Analysis vehicle safety at Cubeware

Oct 27, 2022

I've noticed an area for improvement in GitLab, particularly needing to go through many steps to push the code to the repository. Resolving that issue would make the product better. My team quickly fixed it by writing a small script, then double-clicking or enabling the script to take care of the issue. However, that quick fix was from my team and not the GitLab team, so in the next release, if an automatic deployment feature would be available in GitLab, then that would be good because, in Visual Studio, you can do that with just one click of a button.

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reviewer1579953

Manager at Zensar Technologies

Jun 6, 2022

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.

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RP

System and Storage Engineer at Harsco Corporation

Jul 13, 2020

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.

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reviewer2254248

Principle Product Manager at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Mar 12, 2024

There is a need to improve or adopt AI into the ecosystem like a co-pilot, which Microsoft has done with GitHub.

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Filipe-Marcelino

Head of Digital Solutions at Bravantic

Aug 5, 2022

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.

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reviewer1322850

Technical Lead at a mining and metals company with 51-200 employees

Jan 10, 2021

We are having a few problems integrating with Jira at the moment, which is something that our IT department is investigating.

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CT

DevOps Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Nov 7, 2022

The solution does not have many built-in functions or variables so scripting is required.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 74)

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