Every next move by Gitlab makes them grow in my eyes, personaly. Few weeks ago I started using it as my main "portfolio", it's not much but I really like their way of thinking, openness and providing services. Their whole eco-system is looking really interesting right now, and I hope they will continue to advance and grow.
They definitely have a very interesting strategy, one that is well suited to their target market (= programmers). They're probably the most open company I've seen. Still, I can't justify moving off GitHub, for now. Gitlab has some growing left to do, especially on the SaaS part.
Let's be honest, does anyone pay full price beyond 10 users? If there's anything I've learned it's that the word "enterprise" means "negotiable." I suspect they put that out there so they have a place to start without the costly interaction of emails coming in saying "how much for x people."
I like Github's UI slightly better (though it's been about a year since I've tried Gitlab)... the recent db issue has me concerned though.
That said, I think it's always worth considering using a tool because of their options for the open-source community... github, travis-ci etc have changed the way a lot of people work. GitLab might be what I reach for for self-hosting, but more likely to try the community/open edition first.
Using VSO (VisualStudio.com) for hosting at work, and some of the integration parts are very nice... Though no idea what a private TFS instance costs.
I use Gitlab and the DB issue only affected me in regards to CI, and I believe this is true to anyone that was affected at all.
They did a manual Backup before meddling with stuff so they only lost data from a really small timeframe.
CI downtime, on the other hand, is troublesome. I love using Gitlab CI and it didn't take me more than a few minutes to manually deploy what I had to, but I decided I need most of my CI to be controlled by me.
The end result is a simple refactor of my test and deploy specs to their own rake tasks (Could be Bash scriots or whatever) and I'll have Gitlab run a simple gle command, if it goes down I run the command manually...
Now some eventual downtime is not such a deal breaker anymore, and I continue having private repos and CI (Awesome CI) for even the smallest (And private) projects I work on... Not a bad deal if I do say so myself.
$21/user/month billed annually in packs of 10 (what your source says) would be $252/user/year in $2520 increments. It's actually (per the GHE features page) $2500/year for each 10 user pack though, which is $250/user/year.
GitLab Enterprise Starter is $39/user/year, and GitLab Enterprise Premium is $199/user/year.
We hear you and agree, GitLab.com is too slow. We're working on multiple things to improve it https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 GitLab 9.1 will have lots of performance improvements for database queries. The GItaly team is working hard to move git commands to the fileservers to reduce latency, that will happen in about a month from now.
As a thought for the performance diagnosis part of things, if your network switches have the option to enable NetFlow (also known as IPFIX), it can be extremely useful.
It does need to be paired with something that can capture and display the NetFlow data well. But with that, you can literally see what data is going where in your network, accurate to the byte. And with a good visualisation solution, you have the data historically too, so you can (easily) match things up time wise.
eg a developer writes a bad query which pulls 1/2 the database over the network to the front end server for filtering results there, instead of filtering them in the database. You can see that on the network fairly easily, and let the developer self-educate (if given access to the tools). ;)
As an aside, the gold standard used to be a commercial product called "NetFlow Tracker". It was amazing (fond memories), but the company behind it (Fluke Networks) didn't seem to know anything about software sales. So, it's now discontinued. :(
Hopefully there's a modern version of that somewhere. :)
We're working very hard on making GitLab.com much faster. Right now, it's measurably (and more importantly: measured [0]) faster than it was a month ago.
If you would like to follow progress you can dive into it all here [1]. One of the spearpoints is Gitaly, which should significantly improve git access.
Thanks for the confidence in our approach :D Being open and honest about everything is super important to our company culture. We definitely have some great stuff in the pipeline for the next few months.
I started a new project recently, and put it on Gitlab instead of GitHub. I'm very pleased so far, and have been finding reasons to justify encouraging others to move projects there as well.
The biggest thing I think would encourage more projects to move is improving discoverability. On Github, I can very easily search for new projects to contribute to, and their Explore page [1] is very nice. Gitlab's, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have a way to browse by category like Github.
For everything else, I like Gitlab a lot -- it seems to have the best integration of tools of any code host.
I completely agree. Actually, I think Github could do a better job with discovery too. The Explore page is a decent start, but why don't I get personalized recommendations for new projects?
Yes, that would be nice -- look at the languages my code is written in or the categories my code is, it makes sense to suggest new projects based on that.
First and foremost for me are protected branches. For everywhere I've worked, giving someone commit access to the main repository means giving them the ability to rewrite history on the release branch as well. GitLab solves that nicely by allowing committers to append only to protected branches by default.
I'm also warming to the idea of treating CI as "pipelines", and find myself thinking of tooling more in that way.
GitHub has that too, I noticed the other day. I still think Gitlab is much better, and use it by default for everything new, but fair's fair :P
I love the integrated CI, though, and the use cases it enables. I love that I can just make a pipeline that lints, tests and compiles my code and then, if all of those pass, ends with deploying it to production.
There are many more Gitlab features I like a lot, and the fact that they're all integrated is icing on the cake.
It took forever for GitHub to get anything, until Gitlab lit a fire under their ass. GitHub were perfectly content just resting on their laurels while every essential feature was handled by a different $15/mo third party service.
I recently setup a small personal project on Gitlab as well. I've been very impressed. I was able to setup a private repo, with a CI setup that builds my code and runs my tests every time i push a commit.. all on their servers. For free.
Have you actualy used Gitlab? I can't say they are becoming bloated, because they services are of high quality? Have you tried their CI/CD? Github is stagnating. Yeah, they are industry standard, but competition is best thing that can happen to them and users.
I haven't seen them promoting that hard as you describe.
I wrote my comment of the pure satisfaction with their services and my use case. So stop being ignorant and be civilized and at least argument what you say. What happened to them month ago was an accident that could happen to many others, but the difference was that they were 100% open about it, with others you may won't even know shit is happening.
Nobody forces you to use anything.
Edit: And now you edit and delete 90% of comment, nice.
Imo github has the much better user interface. I wouldn't say gl became bloated, but it is not easy to navigate around. At one point, I think, it is necessary to 'rethink' the UI, i.e. to arrange the parts into one consistent beautiful whole.
That is true. GitHub really got it with the UI, and it was so easy to get used to. Later on, I was thinking I was having slight problems with GL's interface because I was so used to GitHub, but after some time spending on GitLab, I think they really could rethink the UI.
Have you actualy used Gitlab? I can't say they are becoming bloated, because they services are of high quality? Have you tried their CI/CD? Github is stagnatingn. Yeah, they are industry standard, but competition is best thing that can happen to them and users.
I have. I've installed Gitlab and Mattermost on my own server. Gitlab is great but I found Slack was a better product (over Mattermost). Have you tried installing it?
I created a Gitlab account and was planning on using it over Github but their recent data loss scared me off. Is that unreasonable? It worries me just as much to see them buying a company a month after that. Is slowing down unreasonable?
I want to use Gitlab. I like their open approach, but if people just praise them without being objective about it it doesn't benefit any of us. I might just be a selfish and/or entitled user but you'll forgive me for wanting Gitlab to be good. Don't you?
I had some confusion with the install. It seems the Docker install is favored, but not using a lot of Docker stuff I went with the gitlab-omnibus install on Ubuntu 16.10.
It worked but I didn't feel especially comfortable with it, there were a number of steps. That's vague enough be useless and it could have just been my own ignorance. What is the suggested install if that isn't too basic of a question?
I also had issues with it not liking users sending rather large files but I believe that's an odd use case.
I would use it again but the simplicity of Slack (no setup and no management) won out for now.
What happens to Mattermost? They even touched on this ...
"What about Mattermost, how is this different?
Gitter was built to be used in the open. We’ve always seen Gitter as a network, or a place where people can come to connect to one another. Team collaboration, whilst possible, has never been a core aspect of the Gitter experience.
Mattermost is a powerful, integrated messaging product for team collaboration - we will continue to ship and recommend using Mattermost for internal team communication."
They surely have the best intentions. Hopefully one product doesn't take priority over the other and/or they can prevent cannibalization. There's definite overlap.
Mattermost is developed by another team https://about.mattermost.com/company/ that is separate from the GitLab/Gitter team. So I think both will continue to grow without affecting each other.
Edits: typos, wrote from phone.