We performed a comparison between GitHub and GitLab based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Result: Based on the reviews provided by users, GitHub and GitLab both seem to provide comprehensive and practical software development and project management tools. Long-time users find GitLab's customer service and responsiveness less reliable than GitHub's because they haven't had enough time to develop in that direction.
"Has great integration with third-party tools."
"The code versioning is excellent, and having a detailed log, including every change made to the code by every developer, is invaluable. It makes it so that if there is a bug or problem in the product channel, we can find exactly where it happened and how to fix it."
"The product has a good UI. It's simple and easy to access, and technical help is easily available. The two-factor authentication security is another valuable feature."
"It is really simple to set up."
"The most valuable feature is help offered by the community for open-source projects."
"The features that I have found most valuable are that it can support you for most of the road map and it can automate some tasks which works really well with collaboration with the teams. They are really interested in how they organize the history of the code itself which is good."
"We've found the technical support to be very helpful."
"Complication free with good ability for third-party integrations."
"GitLab is kind of an image of GitHub, so it gives us the flexibility to monitor our changes in the repos."
"As a developer, this solution is useful as a repository holder because most of the POC projects that we have are on GitLab."
"Everything is easy to configure and easy to work with."
"GitLab is a solution for source code management, container registry, pipelines, testing, and deployment."
"We have seen a couple of merge requests or pull requests raised in GitLab. I see the interface, the way it shows the difference between the two source codes, that it is easy for anyone to do the review and then accept the request; the pull request is the valuable feature."
"GitLab's best features are continuous integration and fast deployment."
"The most valuable feature of GitLab is its convenience. I am able to trace back most of my changes up to a far distance in time and it helps me to analyze and see the older version of the code."
"GitLab offers a good interface for doing code reviews between two colleagues."
"This solution could be improved by offering crowd sourced support where we could ask questions to other users."
"This solution could be improved if migration was fully automated to make it easy, for example, to migrate repositories into GitHub."
"There could be more integration into Azure."
"The onboarding process could be simplified."
"The project management sector really needs some improvement for GitHub. I don't know if GitHub made sense for me as a project manager."
"It would be useful to have tutorial videos within the GitHub dashboard."
"I would want to see some form of code security scanning implemented."
"There is a bit of a learning curve."
"Expand features to match other tools such as a static code analysis tool so third-party integrations are not required."
"The documentation is confusing."
"The integration and storage capabilities could be better."
"I rate the support from GitLab a four out of five."
"There is a need to improve or adopt AI into the ecosystem like a co-pilot, which Microsoft has done with GitHub."
"I believe there's room for improvement in the advanced features, particularly in enhancing the pipeline functionalities."
"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 could add a plugin to integrate with Kubernetes stuff."
GitHub is ranked 12th in Application Security Tools with 69 reviews while GitLab is ranked 7th in Application Security Tools with 70 reviews. GitHub is rated 8.6, while GitLab is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of GitHub writes "Beneficial version control and continuous integration, but guides would be helpful". On the other hand, the top reviewer of GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". GitHub is most compared with Snyk, AWS CodeCommit, Bitbucket, Fortify on Demand and Qualys Web Application Scanning, whereas GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Bamboo, SonarQube, AWS CodePipeline and Tekton. See our GitHub vs. GitLab report.
See our list of best Application Security Tools vendors.
We monitor all Application Security Tools 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.
