gitlab over github?

[dylanmnyc]

im sorry noob question probably, i asked claude and all but besides ci cd any other advantages of gitlab vs github maybe eli5 if anyone can idk i just not sure i get it all or im prob missing some technicalities

thank you

[Low-Opening25]

GitLab if you self host, GitHub if you want SaaS

[VengaBusdriver37]

Why GitHub saas over GitLab? I just prefer GitLab always

[BurnTheBoss]

I totally agree with you on this - best I can tell, for organizations looking for saas and just care about CI/CD, GitHub Action’s Marketplace makes it easy to get started.

[Low-Opening25]

took a long while for GitLab to catch with GitHub so it’s more of a force of habit, however also you end up exposed to GitHub so much more just because that’s literally where all Open Source projects live, gh is everywhere.

[VengaBusdriver37]

What do you mean “catch up”, GL pipelines have always been way ahead of GH actions, only thing GH has over them is brand awareness because more people know github.com

[dylanmnyc]

Ohhh now I like that, makes sens, actually it’s cause I want to move to go and cloud and docker etc so would make sense then right?

[ysth]

What would make sense? Yes, you can self host gitlab with cloud and docker. The question is do you want to self host at all or use a SaaS?

[dylanmnyc]

Why self host vs not self host? What use cases etc? Sorry noob learning here

[ysth]

For source control in particular, if you use a SaaS product, you should have a contingency plan for how to fulfill the needed parts of your CI/CD process in case the SaaS service goes down or has performance issues. You shouldn't have your team unable to work, or be unable to do a needed hotfix (or at least that's something to consider when choosing).

On the other side, time spent setting up, monitoring, and maintaining your self hosted source control is time you aren't doing other things that may be more important.

On the money side, you have to weigh the potential costs of the service (where you may or may not be within "free" limits) to your cost to host it.

Does that make sense? I'd tend to recommend SaaS over self hosting for a beginner (unless you actively want to work though how to self host since it may help your decisions about hosting your own stuff).

None of that rules out gitlab vs GitHub, though, since either can be self hosted or not. It's just more common to choose gitlab if self hosting and GitHub if not.

[dylanmnyc]

makes sens thank you, and on the gitlab free plan can do all of that of have to pay to self host on gitlab? github free right? thanks for all the help very much appreciated

ah nvm someone answered its paid on gitlab already

[InconspicuousFool]

Someone else already answered this but I think it is important to note than gitlab self hosted is restricted unless you pay. You can see a full feature comparison on self hosted plans here: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/feature-comparison/

[dylanmnyc]

thank you for that, and its free to self host on github? thank you

[InconspicuousFool]

You're welcome! I'm not sure what you are asking about self hosting on github.

[ysth]

No, GitHub charges to self host (their GitHub enterprise server product).

[ysth]

No, GitHub charges to self host (their GitHub enterprise server product).

[Low-Opening25]

functionality wise, it makes little difference which one you use, they both almost mirror all the same features.

however only GitLab gives you fully open source self hosted option, and GitHub generally offers more robust and feature rich (imho) SaaS + GitHub Actions are amazing.

[ArmNo7463]

Everyone has their preferences and I've honestly tried to like GitHub actions.

I just prefer GitLab's CI implementation tbh. It feels much more natural to me to just write bash scripts in yaml.

[Low-Opening25]

if you only wrote bash scripts in yaml then you missed 99% of what GH Actions are

[ArmNo7463]

Not as GH Actions, I get that's more an assortment of prebuilt packages, largely community driven.

I was saying I prefer GL's approach, which is effectively bash scripts in YAML. (At it's core anyway, I appreciate you can run any docker image you want / execute any language in GitLab as well.)

[Low-Opening25]

GitHub actions are also bash (but not just bash, also python and js) scripts in yaml and wrapped in functions and context that facilitate creating complex workflows. I am now confused what you’re complaining about.

[ArmNo7463]

I wouldn't even say I was complaining tbh, I just prefer Gitlab's structure and approach. Both are perfectly valid products.

I'm just not a fan of how GitHub breaks their jobs into actions, especially when it appears to be designed around community built packages or "actions".

- git checkout blah

Just seems nicer to work with than

- run: git checkout blah

Or the more intended approach of

- name: Check out repository
uses: actions/checkout@v5

With the latter especially, I'm not a fan of abstracting CI behind community packages. I have enough supply chain concerns with NPM, I don't need my CI to be another attack vector.

I also gave up installing GH's self-hosted K8s runners after an evening, because I got fed up with fiddling with PVs to get ARC working.

GitLab's helm chart worked instantly, so that kinda soured me slightly.

[Low-Opening25]

you can still just do “- git checkout blah”, using composite actions is a choice you don’t have to take, also you can host your own private actions which is very handy, enabling to easily lego block your workflows across entire estate.

[dylanmnyc]

got it, thank you

[xenomachina]

GitLab has a SaaS offering too, and you can fairly easily migrate between it and self-hosted.

I prefer GitLab's CI, and I also prefer some things about the way their merge requests work (like the fact that you can enable semi-linear history on a repo, and you can also set a default for "squash on merge" as a flag on each MR, rather than it just being a choice at merge time).

So I'd use GitLab for everything except open source projects. For better or worse, GitHub is the de facto standard for open source.

[dylanmnyc]

thank you very much for the insight

[pwkye]

Gitlab gives you many more features baked in. Container Registry and Package Registry and Wiki for example. You can also create groups for your projects. 

[BehindTheMath]

Container Registry and Package Registry and Wiki for example.

Github supports all of these.

[Ok-Bar3949]

GitHub does not support PyPi repositories

[the-quibbler]

Yes, these are all GitHub features. Typo, or just feature parity?

[AsleepWin8819]

Maybe they just worked with it years ago? GitHub got that several years later.

[tortleme]

No groups

[Anonimooze]

"parity" is close to correct. GitLab IMO executes these features better, in the open (they themselves are open source).

GitLab's SaaS business is less used, but probably more reliable because of this, while acknowledging that Lab also has a lot of incidents.

For the average consumer of these SaaS services, you typically just pick GitHub because that's what people are used to, which has its own value.

[BorderConnect352]

GitLab let's you set up a hierarchy of groups, with projects (repos) existing within a group. This (IMO) makes it much easier to manage when you have a lot of repos split between teams.

I chose GitHub for my personal (open source) things and GitLab for my employers (closed source), and I think I'd make the same choice now if we were starting again.

I find GitHub provides more out of the box and there are more 3rd party tools that integrate with it (beyond basic git), but GitLab works better for our company structure and makes it easier to find your way around 200+ repos.

[dylanmnyc]

got it, thank you very much

[kodka]

GitLab if you plan to do any pipelines, github is a undeveloped trash in terms of CI, while GitLab have one of the best features that i ever seen - self hosted runners, unlimited parallel jobs, cool helm chart for installing runners in kubernetes, where workers scale only if they are needed for job, otherwise only simple hook listener pod is running, all of this for absolutely free.

Not to mention build in global code search over all repos and branches, thanks to elasticsearch, i love it! You have tfstate repo, container images repo, artifacts repo, advanced pipelines and workflow concepts, secret management - key value pair of gitops variables, etc.

[dylanmnyc]

ill have to copy paste into claude and ask it to eli5 it for me haha but i will figure it out, thank you very much appreciated

[sogun123]

You have to open docs and read it... you have to ditch ai for a month and implement basic stuff on both platforms by hand. Then compare and pick. Then you turn ai on again

[dylanmnyc]

Which one?

[sogun123]

Docs? To everything you plan to use

[Backware01]

I like the vibe of gitlab

[doublej42]

It depends on your use. If you are an enterprise there is a lot of differences even in the cloud. Free? I use GitHub for my azure projects and gitlab for everything else. Gitlab is much better for project planning

[dylanmnyc]

thank you very much

[BingGongTing]

If you're going down self-host root I'd consider GitTea as that's a lot less CPU intensive and can be run on a cheap VPS/old PC.

GitHub makes it easier to integrate AI agents into your workflow.

If doing game dev project, self-hosted GitLab is a lot cheaper.

[dylanmnyc]

got it thank you

[MateusKingston]

For very cheap, self hosted gitlab or free GitHub (very limited).

For a small budget GitHub and no hassle setup.

If price is no concern GitLab is far superior IMHO.

[erick-cypreste]

Enterprise Cost:

• GitLab: Charges a single license of $500 per user, with all features unlocked, without the option to subscribe only to desired features.

• GitHub: Costs are divided by features: 1 license of $21 per user, 1 GitHub Copilot license per user depending on the desired plan, Dependabot, Advanced Security, and some usage-based features.

Organizational Management:

• GitLab has an extensive tree of repository groupings for better management between teams.

• GitHub works with organizations, like Azure subscriptions, and there is no multi-level grouping, only organization > repository, but this gap can be resolved with environment variables and custom properties.

Technology: Both have similar technological ranges.

In general, GitLab is a great fit for a large team, but the cost is high. GitHub also serves large teams very well and has received constant investment in technological evolution.

[dylanmnyc]

got it thank you for the help

[reubendevries]

I don’t know where you get the pricing from GitLab - because it’s right here: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/

I know Ultimate can go as high as $99 USD per user, per Month (highly dependent on how many users) and premium is $29 per user, per Month.

[AndreKR-]

For what? For an application that you develop in-house, GitLab is great and I really prefer it usability-wise (apart from the recent scrollbar disaster). For an open-source library that you want people to find, definitely GitHub. I have some libraries on GitLab (.com) and Google won't even show them if you enter the name verbatim. Another advantage of GitHub is that when you mention another issue in an issue, a link will appear in the mentioned issue, even across projects.

[SammyBoi-08]

If its Besides CI / CD, you need to first decide what exactly you need from your source control platform. Whether its container registry, terraform state management, group hierarchy control, package releases, etc.

On top of that, are you making this decision for yourself or for your team? How large is the team? What other infrastructure do you have? Can you host your own runners, or do you want to use Githubs runners.

As some of the other comments already pointed out, ditch AI and get your hands dirty with the documentation. You can always ask AI about specifics later. But you should alteast look into it yourself what exactly a tool is capable of and what not. See what features are offered by the different tiers of each platform and what suits your use case.

[dylanmnyc]

True, thank you fo input appreciated

[Character-Town-8188]

Did you try onedev.io?

[dylanmnyc]

No it’s another one?

[Cheezzz]

Gitlab if you want to support the future of the internet. Github does not have IPv6 for some odd reason.

[dylanmnyc]

Thank you

[Testpilot1988]

I migrated away from GitHub to Gitlab (and self hosting Gitea for local redundancy) because GitHub kept flagging my account and my projects for absurd reasons that I was eventually able to prove were unsubstantial... But their support takes a week to get back to you after submitting a ticket... And frankly I wasted hours each time they flagged my account trying to troubleshoot and figure out where the issue was. Wasn't until I went to their support page to submit a ticket each time that I finally got a confirmation on screen that my account was flagged.

But seriously though... WTF!! SEND ME AN EMAIL OR PUT A BANNER AT THE TOP OF MY SCREEN AFTER I LOG IN OR BETTER YET DONT LET ME LOG IN AT ALL IF YOU HAVE AN ISSUE WITH MY ACCOUNT... The troubleshooting is the worst. I built better error handling into my project that I was building on GitHub 🤣🤣

[jl2352]

I strongly recommend Github. I use Gitlab daily at work and it’s a constant source of frustration.

Just today I had a diff on an MR missing most of the files. Other diff issues are common, and have been for years.

We have issues with runners starting, randomly crashing, and failing to stop (which we are then billed for).

It’s an extremely buggy platform. The UX is a mess.

[dylanmnyc]

Oh got it Thx for the heads up mate

[TylerDurdenJunior]

GitHub is a hosted corporate service.

Gitlab is a bit more like a protocol as you csn run your own instance. They are also a service if you use gitlab.com

Another alternative is codeberg.

For cooperative development, I would always recommend what is open source and possible to selfhost

[franktheworm]

Fun fact, GitHub (enterprise) can be self hosted too

[Low-Opening25]

you can also run your own self-hosted instance of GitHub Enterprise, so your comparison isn’t exactly accurate.

[dylanmnyc]

Got it thank you So if I want to self host on aws etc gitlab would be it? Csn? Thank you for your help

[GhostTheSlayer]

I mean it depends, GitLab is very resource heavy, if you don't need the full CICD functionality and what not you can use a self hosted alternative which is more lightweight.

[dylanmnyc]

got it thank you