We performed a comparison between Jenkins and Gitlab based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, GitLab comes out ahead of Jenkins. Our reviewers found that installation on Windows is not intuitive and its maintenance can be more demanding.
"The SaaS setup is impressive, and it has DAST solutioning."
"The tool helps to integrate CI/CD pipeline deployments. It is very easy to learn. Its security model is good."
"GitLab's best features are maintenance, branch integration, and development infrastructure."
"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."
"GitLab is kind of an image of GitHub, so it gives us the flexibility to monitor our changes in the repos."
"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 have had no problem with the stability of the solution."
"Key features allow creation of well-presented Wiki that includes ideas, development, and domains."
"We are using the open-source version and there is a lot of plugins and features that are available and it works on agents for free. In other solutions, it will cost extra to use them with the agent."
"Jenkins's open-based framework is very valuable."
"The solution is scalable and has a large number of plugins that can help you scale it to your needs."
"Has enabled full automation of the company."
"The most valuable features of Jenkins are the ease of use and the information about how to use the features is readily available on the internet. Additionally, with the solution, I can use other reporting tools, such as Flow."
"Having builds and test tasks triggered on commit helps not to break the product."
"Jenkins has a lot of built-in packages and tools."
"We use Jenkins to automatically build Python binaries into several OS's i.e. OS X, Ubuntu, Windows 32-bit and Windows 64-bit."
"There is room for improvement in GitLab Agents."
"For as long as I have used GitLab, I haven't encountered any major limitations. However, I think that perhaps the search functionality could be better."
"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."
"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."
"I'm new to GitLab, so I would appreciate more documentation about the code and commands."
"There is a need to improve or adopt AI into the ecosystem like a co-pilot, which Microsoft has done with GitHub."
"It is a little complex to set up the pipelines within the solution."
"GitLab's UI could be improved."
"Its schedule builds need improvement. It should have scheduling features in the platform rather than using external plug-ins."
"Sometimes you have Jenkins restarting because of OOM errors."
"The solution could improve by having more advanced integrations."
"There are a lot of things that they can try to improvise. They can reduce a lot of configurations. It is currently supporting Groovy for scripting. It would be really good if it can be improvised for Python because, for most of the automation, we have Python as a script. It would be good if can also support Python. We have a lot of Android builds. These Android builds can be a part of Jenkins. It can have some plug-ins or configurations for Android builds. There should also be some internal matrix to check the performance. We also want to have more REST API support, which is currently not much in Jenkins. We are not able to get more information about running Jenkins. More REST API support should be provided."
"The product should provide more visualization as to how many pipelines are performing and how many builds are happening. It should also integrate with Kubernetes and OpenShift."
"Jenkins needs a faster deployment process."
"Tasks such as deployment, cloning, database switchover, and all other database missions and tasks are being done through Jenkins. If a job does not go through, at times the error message does not clearly indicate what caused the failure. I have to escalate it to the Jenkins DevOps team just to see what caused the failure. If the error message is clear, then I wouldn't have to escalate the issue to different teams."
"It does not have a very user-friendly interface."
GitLab is ranked 1st in Build Automation with 70 reviews while Jenkins is ranked 2nd in Build Automation with 83 reviews. GitLab is rated 8.6, while Jenkins is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Jenkins writes "A highly-scalable and stable solution that reduces deployment time and produces a significant return on investment". GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Bamboo, SonarQube, AWS CodePipeline and GitHub CoPilot, whereas Jenkins is most compared with Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline, IBM Rational Build Forge, Tekton and Harness. See our GitLab vs. Jenkins report.
See our list of best Build Automation vendors.
We monitor all Build Automation 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.
