GitLab Room for Improvement
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.
In terms of additional features, nothing comes to mind. One of the potential pitfalls is to keep adding new features and functionalities. They can just improve some of the existing features to make it high-end, top-quality. I don't have any substantial experience with agile planning. I don't know the industries GitLab is in, and I don't know why they make decisions like this, but as a customer, I would rather see them invest in improving the basic agile planning functionalities rather than adding, for example, portfolio planning features. That's because if I'm going to do portfolio planning, I probably will also need a lot of business users. I'm not sure if I want them in GitLab, I'd rather have them in Jira collaborating with me on portfolio planning. That's way better fitted for that type of work.
View full review »PP
reviewer1735587
Delivery Head - DevOps at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The release schedules are quite clear. Even if I'm expecting some improvement, the improvement release cycles are already there in place. So 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.
AM
Anton Makarevich
DevOps/Cloud Lead
They have had a Kubernetes integration built in, but they recently announced that in Version 16 they're going to strip out the legacy Kubernetes integration, and then introduce a new way of doing the integration. I don't really like the new way because it is pretty focused on the on-premise environment, but we're in a hybrid environment. The integration they're offering is not really a good fit for hybrid infrastructure and I was disappointed with that new feature.
I work for a government-based institution in the US and government-based institutions are very strict about compliance and security. The new model GitLab is offering implies the connectivity will be initiated from the server side to the clients, meaning from Kubernetes back to GitLab, and that's not going to work in our space. We cannot allow traffic back from the cloud to on-prem, so that's going to be a compliance violation. I understand why they want to implement the feature, maybe it's going to be more solid, but it looks like they aren't taking into consideration hybrid environments and the security and compliance aspects. We will find a workaround, but we're still kind of disappointed. It'll generate a lot of additional work.
One feature that has been requested by our development team is a multi-level review of the pool request. When you maintain code and you've got a lot of contributors, a contributor can submit a change in the form of a pool request. There is a feature called merge request in GitLab for when you have a team of people who are supposed to approve a change, but Atlassian BitBucket has a more complete version of the same feature, which includes a multi-approval mechanism. For instance, if you have three people, you can create a rule for how changes should be approved. Maybe they should be approved by you and me and the third guy is not really important, or it could be approved by only you or me, or all three of us together. BitBucket has that flexibility and there is no such flexibility in GitLab.
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GitLab
March 2024
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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.
View full review »MP
reviewer1579953
Manager at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
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.
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.
View full review »CT
AK13
DevOps Engineer at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The solution does not have many built-in functions or variables so scripting is required and that is a drawback. For example, it would be nice to have a button on the interface for setting up environments in meta folders.
View full review »In terms of the solution's interface and features, I am satisfied.
As a partner, sometimes it's difficult to get support. They have a really complicated procedure for their support. Apart from the aforementioned reason, I am very satisfied with the product. It is only after we are registered that we get proper support from GitLab. The registration itself it's quite complicated, and it is mainly because they want to make sure that the users with a license contact the right support team.
View full review »SK
reviewer1992327
Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The solution should expand features to match other tools such as Coverity, Veracode, or SonarQube with its static code analysis tool so third-party integrations are not required.
There can be a lapse of fifteen minutes to a day when updates are pushed. We do receive email notification of upcoming lapses and push progress, so that helps.
View full review »OA
Onur Aktuğ
Software Test Manager at ASELSAN
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.
The main shortcoming is that with some parts of GitLab, things can get quite complex. Especially in the beginning, the learning curve can be a bit steep and it takes some time to learn how to use the tools. That said, once you understand the mentality of it, it becomes easy.
PT
Prabu T
Senior Project Manager at Wipro Limited
We have only seen a couple of times on Gitlab, which we use for building some of the applications. Recently, we have heard that some of the builds were taking a long time or were not scheduled. In such cases, they had to contact the GitLab community or the GitLab organization to address these issues.
So, there is room for improvement in regard to the issues with build times.
In future releases, additional features could be added in post-deployment monitoring. Currently, GitLab supports CI/CD up to deployment. Anything that would assist in monitoring deployments, especially in the context of Kubernetes or Docker, would be valuable. It may not be necessary for enterprise-level use, but for midrange organizations, integrating post-deployment monitoring of infrastructures and generating reports could be beneficial.
View full review »Some of the scripts that we encountered in GitLab were not fully functional and threw up errors. The aforementioned area of the solution needs improvement.
In the future, I would like to see GitLab providing more oversight over the coding part.
BA
Boulat_Ashimov
IT Processes Methodologist at Gysan Gmart
The solution should be more cloud-native and have more cloud-native capabilities and features. It should be more GitOps-ready.
View full review »HA
reviewer1411572
Researcher at the InfoCloud Research Group at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
There is room for improvement in GitLab Agents.
I would like to see more features focused on GitLab or CICD. I am not sure if there is a roadmap for GitLab CI/CD Elite.
View full review »Authentication can be a problem when you have an application and you want to configure it with them. I used Spring Cloud config and to connect that to GitLab was so hard. It took hours for me to configure that.
View full review »SM
reviewer1640307
Product Development Team Lead R&D at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
GitLab's Windows version is yet not available and having this would be an improvement. This is compared to Azure Git where Microsoft provides us with the setup of virtual agents which you can download and set up quickly. Your laptop will become an agent which is connected to your cloud environment to execute the job which is triggered from the cloud environment.
SB
Slaven Batnozic
CTO at Dokument IT d.o.o.
Some of the programmers in my company have had complaints about the product.
We do face issues in our company when we run out of disk space. We had to do some low-level system interventions to recover the server from GitLab in our company. It would be good if GitLab implemented some diagnostic features so that the server prevents functioning when it detects insufficient disk space. It is important to prevent cache to avoid running out of disk space. Considering the aforementioned details, making a recovery wasn’t simple.
When deploying the solution on cloud and the CI/CD pipeline, we have to define the steps and it becomes confusing. The trend is shifting toward CI/CD pipeline automation, so GitLab could provide some features that help with CI/CD automation.
There could also be integration with different cloud services like GCP, AWS, or Microsoft Azure. A one-click deployment with the CI/CD pipeline of our code would be a good feature.
View full review »GitLab could improve the package repository. It does not have support for Conan packages revisions.
Additionally, better support for deploying GitLab in Kubernetes is needed (i.e. more mature helm packages and updated documentation).
View full review »GitLab could add a plugin to integrate with Kubernetes stuff.
View full review »JO
Javier Orellana
SCRUM Master at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
We'd like to see better integration with the Atlassian ecosystem. There needs to be better and native integration. That is really useful for us as Atlassian Jira has strong integration with Bitbucket, and Bitbucket is a computation of GitLab.
We'd always like to see better pricing on the product. If they could make the cost lower, that would be ideal for users.
View full review »I'm not sure of the complete capabilities of the tool as I don't use it that much. Perhaps the integration could be better.
View full review »LD
Letarik Terefe
IT Project Management /Research & Development Team Leader at Ethiopian Roads Administration
I would like to see security increased in the future. A secure environment is very important.
The documentation is confusing. Sometimes, it is incomplete or has incorrect information. I have informed the vendor about it. Some features in the GitLab Community Edition are not available to us.
View full review »The integration could be slightly better.
The interface should be more user-friendly.
View full review »The solution should again offer an on-premises deployment option. In the past, an on-premises solution was offered that used to sync with the cloud-based solution. We would like that option to return because many industries are interested in offline uploads and pathways.
The solution should integrate Web 3.0 and provide better system transactions.
View full review »KM
KulbhushanMayer
Co Founder and Technical Architect at Think NYX Technologies LLP
The documentation in GitLab could be improved a bit. For example, their RBAC is role-based access, which is fine but not very good. It could also be improved a lot.
View full review »VT
VivekTripathi
Senior Test Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
We had to write GitLab configuration files, commands and conditions, in a YML format. I would like configuration of a YML file to be done via UI rather than a code file. There should be support for code files, as well, but if there could be a UI for it and a little bit of documentation along with it, that would help.
KH
Keith Hodges
Environmental engineer at Coventry Building Society
The problem with Git is that it's a solution for managing your source code history. But with Git, you can edit the history, which is not ideal.
Another issue is the pricing model of GitLab.
View full review »GitLab could improve by having more plugins and better user-friendliness.
View full review »We are currently using Atlasian Bitbucket, Jira and Confluence. Atlassian offers more products than GitLab. GitLab offers source control management, version control and collaboration between developers. Atlassian offers features on top of this as well as more integration points for developers.
View full review »SK
reviewer1249881
Software Designer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The user interface could be more user-friendly. We do most of our operations through the website interface but it could be better.
View full review »Merge conflicts and repository maintenance could improve. If there is someone new to the system they would not know if there is a conflict.
In a feature release, it would be helpful if there was AI integrated into the system. For example, if there was a CI/CD pipeline available, we could configure them for our purpose without doing the process manually.
View full review »ZE
Zulham Ertanto
Web developer at Ertanto
GitLab should include more features because, during the pandemic, companies like Google introduced more features. The integration and storage capabilities could be better. This would be very handy for educators and students.
SS
Srashti Saraf
Application development specialist at Eccenter
It is a little complex to set up the pipelines within the solution.
View full review »GitLab can improve by integrating with more tools, such as servers with Docker.
View full review »CC
CK Chan
Solution Manager at PCCW
I would like to have some features to support peer review. It would be nice if I can input some comments and share them with the teams. But I am not sure if it is already included in some paid versions.
KK
KuanyshKaribay
Co-Founder at Akhter Studio
This solution could be improved by adding modifications such as slack notifications.
SG
Shrey Gupta
Director Technology at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
We would like to have easier tutorials. Their tutorials are too technical for a user to understand. They should be more detailed but less technical.
We would also like to have a desktop app for GitLab which will make things a little more seamless.
View full review »HR
reviewer1454061
Performance Test Line manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
GitLab can improve the integration with third-party applications. It could be made easier. Additionally, having API control from my application could be helpful.
View full review »I'm new to GitLab, so I would appreciate more documentation about the code and commands.
View full review »PS
Pradeep Singh
DevOps Lead at Adidas
GitLab's UI could be improved. In the next version, the documentation of the migrations steps should be better.
View full review »CB
Chaitanya Bhaskaruni
Team Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
GitLab would be improved with the addition of templates for deployment on local PCs.
View full review »The price of GitLab could improve, it is high.
View full review »The tool should include a feature that helps to edit the code directly.
View full review »AK
Anu Kaple
Technical Lead at FD
The deployment and performance of GitLab could be better. In addition, the solution could be faster.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
GitLab
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about GitLab. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.