GitHub vs. GitLab

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
GitHub
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
GitHub is a platform that hosts public and private code and provides software development and collaboration tools. Features include version control, issue tracking, code review, team management, syntax highlighting, etc. Personal plans ($0-50), Organizational plans ($0-200), and Enterprise plans are available.
$40
per year per user
GitLab
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
GitLab DevSecOps platform enables software innovation by aiming to empower development, security, and operations teams to build better software, faster. With GitLab, teams can create, deliver, and manage code quickly and continuously instead of managing disparate tools and scripts. GitLab helps teams across the complete DevSecOps lifecycle, from developing, securing, and deploying software. Differentiators, as described by Gitlab: Simplicity: With GitLab, DevSecOps can…
$0
per month per user
Pricing
GitHubGitLab
Editions & Modules
Team
$40
per year per user
Enterprise
$210
per year per user
GitLab Essential
$0
per month per user
GitLab Premium
$29
per month per user
GitLab Ultimate
$99
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitHubGitLab
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GitHubGitLab
TrustRadius Insights
GitHubGitLab
Highlights

TrustRadius
Research Team Insight
Published

Features
GitHubGitLab
Version Control Software Features
Comparison of Version Control Software Features features of Product A and Product B
GitHub
7.9
Ratings
4% below category average
GitLab
-
Ratings
Branching and Merging9.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Version History8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Version Control Collaboration Tools7.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Pull Requests9.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Code Review Tools7.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Project Access Control8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated Testing Integration7.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue Tracking Integration4.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Branch Protection9.30 Ratings00 Ratings
User Ratings
GitHubGitLab
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.9
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GitHubGitLab
Likelihood to Recommend
I’ve worked with Github my entire career and view it as an essential part. As a Product manager it allows me to keep track of my features, epics, issues and QA. It is easy to set up and integrate with tools such as intercom or notion.
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It is well-suited for any project that needs VCS. It's an excellent choice for teams that might be remote or have to collaborate across teams. Plenty of features allow for async working. With its dashboards and reporting features, it is also suitable for nontechnical PMs or stakeholders. It allows for very bespoke customization and can most often do much more than you need it to.
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Pros
  • Version control: GitHub provides a powerful and flexible Git-based version control system that allows teams to track changes to their code over time, collaborate on code with others, and maintain a history of their work.
  • Code review: GitHub's pull request system enables teams to review code changes, discuss suggestions and merge changes in a central location. This makes it easier to catch bugs and ensure that code quality remains high.
  • Collaboration: GitHub provides a variety of collaboration tools to help teams work together effectively, including issue tracking, project management, and wikis.
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  • GitLab excels in managing code versions, allowing easy tracking of changes, branch management, and merging contributions.
  • It helps maintain code stability and reliability, saving time and effort in the development or research workflow.
  • Powerful code review features, enabling collaboration and feedback among team members.
  • Robust project management features, including issue tracking, kanban boards, and milestones.
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Cons
  • Not an easy tool for beginners. Prior command-line experience is expected to get started with GitHub efficiently.
  • Unlike other source control platforms GitHub is a little confusing. With no proper GUI tool its hard to understand the source code version/history.
  • Working with larger files can be tricky. For file sizes above 100MB, GitHub expects the developer to use different commands (lfs).
  • While using the web version of GitHub, it has some restrictions on the number of files that can be uploaded at once. Recommended action is to use the command-line utility to add and push files into the repository.
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  • CI variables management is sometimes hard to use, for example, with File type variables. The scope of each variable is also hard to guess.
  • Access Token: there are too many types (Personal, Project, global..), and it is hard to identify the scope and where it comes from once created.
  • Runners: auto-scaled runners are for the moment hard to put in place, and monitoring is not easy.
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Likelihood to Renew
GitHub's ease of use and continued investment into the Developer Experience have made it the de facto tool for our engineers to manage software changes. With new features that continue to come out, we have been able to consolidate several other SaaS solutions and reduce the number of tools required for each engineer to perform their job responsibilities.
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I really feel the platform has matured quite faster than others, and it is always at the top of its game compared to the different vendors like GitHub, Azure pipelines, CircleCI, Travis, Jenkins. Since it provides, agents, CI/CD, repository hosting, Secrets management, user management, and Single Sign on; among other features
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Usability
GitHub is a clean and modern interface. The underlying integrations make it smooth to couple tasks, projects, pull requests and other business functions together. The insights and reporting is really strong and is getting better with every release. GitHub's PR tooling is strong for being web based, i do believe a better code editor would rival having to pull merge conflicts into local IDE.
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I find it easy to use, I haven't had to do the integration work, so that's why it is a 9/10, cause I can't speak to how easy that part was or the initial set up, but day to day use is great!
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
I've never had experienced outages from GItlab itself, but regarding the code I have deployed to Gitlab, the history helps a lot to trace the cause of the issue or performing a rollback to go back to a working version
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Performance
No answers on this topic
GItlab reponsiveness is amazing, has never left me IDLE. I've never had issues even with complex projects. I have not experienced any issues when integrating it with agents for example or SSO
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Support Rating
It's a testament to how easy it is to use GitHub and how many others use it that you can pretty much find the answer to any problem you have by searching online. Consequently, I've never needed to use their support. It's an incredibly easy tool to set up initially, so it won't require much onboarding expertise to get started.
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At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft
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Alternatives Considered
GitHub comes handy in terms of usage and capabilities, it is easy to use and quite a user friendly tools when it comes to user experience, with limited UI/UX and it has vast exposure when it comes to third party integration and being quite mature and yet evolving and popular tool many other platform provide easy integration with the platform and make first choice for many tools architects.
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GitHub is an inferior product from most points of view. We had to use it and the teams finds no positives about it. Everything is a downgrade from our previous GitLab solution. GitLab CI\CD is vastly superior to workflows, for example doing a manual node is just "when : manual" in GitLab while you have to do clickops in GitHub to achieve the same. No overview of code in branches is a minus when we tried to figure out what our colleagues are trying to merge as it looked off.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
I think is very well designed, and like any VCS it works as intended
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Return on Investment
  • GitHub has made branching much easier for our dev team. Easy branching makes it easier for us to gain all the benefits of source control while giving us the flexibility to decide what features/branches we want to go in any particular release.
  • Integration with third-party tools like Azure DevOps has allowed us to streamline workflows and gain the benefits of automated testing whenever a commit is made.
  • GitHub has also raised visibility with its integration with our Sprint boards. We can easily jump to a commit from a work item.
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  • GitLab cut down our spent on container, package and infrastructure registry
  • Best thing is we can now have everything in single platform which cost effective too
  • Quality of support is really good and they do have emergency support team as well which is great
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ScreenShots

GitLab Screenshots

Screenshot of GitLab, a comprehensive DevSecOps platform.Screenshot of Security DashboardScreenshot of Merge Request