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There is absolutely no denying that GitHub has done a lot of good for the world, but at the same time I feel that because of their true open source foundation GitLab really listens to their community much better. On a related note, many devs are just now discovering that with GitLab you can have unlimited private or public repos hosted at GitLab.com for free. Already a number of prominent projects have made the jump for this reason alone. You can find the nascent but growing list of publicly listed projects here: https://gitlab.com/explore

In the end, strong competition is good for users and projects and the Git ecosystem will only continue to grow and benefit from it; may the friendly rivalry continue.

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> You can find the nascent but growing list of publicly listed projects here: https://gitlab.com/explore

Gitlab often comes up in these discussions. Ok, it comes up every time. Several times in the past I've went and checked it out and it seems interesting except...I couldn't find any actual projects from the main gitlab.com page, aside from the gitlab CE repo itself. So thanks for posting that link!

I have to wonder why it's not more prominent. And where's the search to find repos? I regularly find useful repos on github by searching for them. Discoverability is important to me.

>Discoverability is important to me.

Quite a good point. I think, as techies, many of us focus more on the work itself, and not so much on explaining it or making it more discoverable, understood, and on showing its benefits (at least from the point of view of end-users). (As they say about product marketing - explain the benefits, not the features - though I guess that is not to be taken literally, of course the features should be explained too.). I know I need to do more work in this area myself, and am working on it.

We also have a long way to go here and if someone wants to help please apply for the Product Marketing Manager role at https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/

The explore link was visible from our sign in page but I agree we can do better. I made it visible in the top menu of our static website with https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/eaba29f4...

I'm not sure if we will keep it, that will also depend on how many people click on it.

On https://gitlab.com/explore there is a search field, for an example search please see https://gitlab.com/explore?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter_projects=f-...

> The explore link was visible from our sign in page

I had clicked through to a fair number of pages, but not finding any repos I wasn't prepared to sign up, so I missed the repos ;-)

> I made it visible in the top menu of our static website

Quite visible now. I'd guess that if it had been there before I would have clicked on it. Time will tell if it makes a difference. Best wishes.

Thanks!

I've been comparing Github and Gitlab over the last few weeks. Gitlab had a few more features in the web interface, which is why we chose it for a current project. Github has added these features last week, mostly thanks to pressure, which is good. Here's where Gitlab is lacking though: It's quite buggy, its API is nowhere near as good as Github's and there is no way to secure webhooks, which IMO is quite a big deal. If I'd decide today for another project I'd just pay Github 7$ a month and be done with it. In fact if we keep having issues that's exactly what we'll do - migrating in a git world is quite easy for the points mentioned in the article.

I've been quite impressed how Github has acted over the last weeks - when there's actually an outcry they're quite nimble and can react quickly. They've noticed the competition catching up and shot themselves ahead of the curve again.

We used Github enterprise at my previous job, GitLab at my current one. The only driver - GitLab is free. GitLab is painful if you have a lot of experience with Github. Feature comparison is pretty similar, but then again a feature comparison with any SVN web interface is pretty similar too.

I can't pinpoint it, but I'm much more likely to browse, review, and offer pull requests in a github instance. It's intuitive and I'm used to it.

I can't say that I'm bothered with Gitlab's interface, even though I've had much more experience with Github. It uses more colors which sometimes has the effect of making actionable clicks stand out better. Commenting on committed code is one such example, for some reason that UI feels more clear to me. Also, on github I sometimes find myself looking for the commit list, which I always find immediately on Gitlab. IMO if you're used to both UIs it's either a wash or slightly in favour of Gitlab - my issues are purely in the backend.

How trivial it is to send/accept pull-requests with Gitlab? This is one Github feature which I'm highly dependent on. Unlike Mr. Torvalds, we all aren't experts in sending and managing signed pull-requests by emails. Maybe, I'll learn that one day, but Github's features have made me quite lethargic!

GitLab has merge-requests that work very similar. Accepting them should be easier since we have auto-merge on build success https://about.gitlab.com/2015/12/22/gitlab-8-3-released/

If GitLab is painful to use and that causes you or your employees to spend extra time dealing with that pain, then GitLab may be free as in speech, but it is not free as in beer.

It can still be "free as in beer" if there's side-effects; doesn't beer force you to deal with certain kinds of pain, even though it's free?

Negligible effects since I 2 drinks makes me stop enjoying alcohol.

My point is that if you are making a buisiness decision and only thinking of the invoices, you aren't counting your costs well.

It's $25 a month if you want to manage teams. Wish I'd known that before I switched off bitbucket.

what does that mean, you can't add collaborators to your 7$ a month project?

As of the last couple months, you can add collaborators to your project.

thanks for the heads up!

You've always been able to add collaborators to private projects. What you miss out on is the team features, which isn't very much if you have a small team.

Are your team's salaries so low that $25 a month is a noticeable cost?

I can't think of any situation involving multiple paid employees where $25 is anything but a rounding error.

I'm sorry to hear GitLab has not been solid for you. What bugs have you been affected by? What can we improve in our API? Regarding securing webhooks do you mean https://developer.github.com/webhooks/securing/ ?

I've already opened up some issues[1]. What you point to is what I mean, in addition a reverse IP lookup is also useful to tighten security a bit [2], but it's not mandatory. Specifying a secret is IMO the easiest way to have some peace of mind when it comes to accepting hooks. Regarding the API, I mainly found the documentation more difficult to navigate. There doesn't seem a section specifically for gitlab.com, so I just have to assume that 'community edition' applies there. I haven't found a place where the API endpoint for a gitlab.com profile is described, just took a bit of trial and error - and whatever isn't documented for an API I don't like to rely on.

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&sor...

[2] https://developer.github.com/v3/meta/

Thanks for opening those issues days ago! I already marked the documentation issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13479 for the attention of our technical writer 5 days ago. I think having the ability to specify a secret from webhooks makes sense and have asked our CTO and VP of Product for comments in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13478. GitLab.com runs GitLab EE, this is displayed at the top of https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ but please let me know if there is another logical place. The API endpoint paths are the same for all GitLab servers so https://gitlab.example.com/api becomes https://gitlab.com/api. I've made an issue to discuss replacing the example.com url with gitlab.com https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13643

Thanks for all your feedback and creating issues!

You're welcome, and I appreciate the response. I forgot something btw., which is actually the biggest issue I had so far: We were affected by some variant of [1].

Regarding documentation, how about referencing 'gitlab.com' on the following top level selection? [2] You could add a new box linking to the EE documentation. That was the first place where I was looking and made me stumble.

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3150

[2] http://doc.gitlab.com

Thanks for your suggestions.

1. Can you reproduce the web hook push event failure in any way?

2. Thanks for the suggestion, I made https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/doc-gitlab-com/issues/55

There was a conversation about got lab last week, which prompted me to go check out Gitlab. After a good five minutes looking around their site I could not discern that it was possible to host repositories on their servers. Their entire sales pitch is about hosting your own. They need to fix that if they want any attention.

If they made their pages community oriented, and allowed for people to link their github accounts to their Gitlab accounts, then they would have a shot at stealing the hearts and minds.

If they could support forking from github that would be even better, but I bet GitHub would try to block them.

They do mention that hosted GitLab is quite slow, so they strongly encourage you to host your own.

Self hosted gitlab is also slow unfortunately. I introduced gitlab to my company as a replacement for gitosis. It's been ok but we're looking to move to gogs.io which is a lot less clunky and slow. If gitlab really want traction, they need to fix their software to be on par with the quality of other open source offerings.

On what system (resources) are you running gitlab? In my experience it is not slow. I also run a gogs instance; great for the modest resource requirements but by far no match in features and look. Both make sense imho and do not overlap much.

I don't use GitLab but after browsing the source code on their official site[1] I couldn't help but notice how slow it is.

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master

I agree it is too slow. We're working on Git speedups in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12443

Gogs is super quick, well designed and powerful. If it has all the features you require, I highly recommend it. Rolling updates were quite simple, swap nginx from one Docker container to another and you're good to go.

That's good to hear. I've been meaning to look at Gogs again, after having first played with it in it's early days (before pull requests were available). Sounds like it's usable now. :)

I agree that GitLab should be faster. For GitLab 8.5 we made a large number of speed improvements https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42#note_3697...

We recently greatly increased the speed of .com https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42 and because of this I removed the notice from https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/

We can still do better on speed and will continue to make it faster.

On our website we try to cater to both on-premises and SaaS users. Our homepage https://about.gitlab.com/ has 4 offerings of which one is GitLab.com, we plan to reduce this to 3 to make .com more prominent. We also have GitLab.com in the top navigation as well as a Sign In button.

Where did you look on our website and expected to find information about hosting repositories on our servers? Maybe we can add a notice there.

Projects can also be mirrored on Github[1], so even if the main repo is somewhere else (e.g. GitLab or Bitbucket) contributors can still be credited via Github[2] and the project can still get the publicity on Github.

[1]: https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-mirrors/

[2]: e.g. https://github.com/dsandler?tab=contributions&from=2015-10-2...

But you can't disable pull requests and other features (at least when I last checked) which means you still have to actively manage those. This probably means handing access to the GitHub repo to your collaborators so they can click "close" if hey don't want to merge. Next to "close" there's this shiny green "merge" button. Clicking that not only merges the untested change but also adds a change to the copy which isn't in the master ... really bad.

In the PHP community we "fixed" that by being very restrictive with access to the GitHub repo and provide an extra tool (https://qa.php.net/pulls/#repo=php-src) where any contributor can comment/close PRs via a special GitHub account and GitHub API

Gitlab is a me too product whose main selling point is "not github". Github was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader, gitlab can make no such claim. Gitlab is a slow and clunky github clone at best.

Give me a strong reason to switch by doing something cool gitlab. Please have at-least one killer original feature that shows that you are capable of original thinking . Merely existing and throwing some free stuff at me is not a good reason for me to switch.

>Gitlab is a me too product whose main selling point is "not github".

it sounds like some people are looking for just that, though.

Do you want to live in a centralized world or one with competition? How do you support that?

I personally want to live in competition. I support that through allowing my appetites to lead me when making arbitrary choices rather than ceremonious dedication.

as a consumer, I want to feel important. I havent switched but gitlab is making me feel that way. Github makes me feel like I have no choice and Im stupid not to. What seems like the better relationship?

I wholeheartedly agree with you. A world of centralized monopolies is quite a scary prospect. Less so when they are not enforced by government, but concerning nonetheless.

However not everyone in tech feels this way. I detect this sentiment in the parent. See: Peter Thiel's thoughts on competition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLWyP83iU5M http://www.bnjs.co/notes/cs183b-lecture-5-peter-thiel-busine...

Thiel's monopoly idea might encourage someone building a new repository hosting thing to focus on a particular underserved segment and get everyone in that market.

"The thing that’s always a big mistake is going after a giant market on day one because that’s typically evidence that you somehow haven’t defined the categories correctly. It normally means that there is going to be too much competition in one way or another."

competition should happen naturally( i.e somone offering something clearly superior) not because I think there should be competition on principle.

You define nature? I believe nature is defined by action which is intepreted after the fact or predicted before. Naturally we can also see a community such as hacker news has an effect on the wider population but likely not as strong of one that it, as a group, wants. But hacker news isnt one group but rather many voices that may or may not have similar objectives

That is nature

Edit: you do because you are apart of it. But your beliefs can influence but do not define nature

Surely you're arguing for there to be a monopoly at any given time there - if company X does Y first, you'll always use company X's stuff (even after other companies implement Y) until another company does Z first, in which case you'll always use their stuff.

Or, more specifically - there should only be one company in the world manufacturing nuts and bolts, because you can't really create a superior nut. The first company to invent them should've won out.

To be honest, superior nuts is being produced:

* self locking nuts

* different steel alloys

* different price points

* different certifications

Thinking that others jobs are simple is a mistake that I'm waning myself off: thinking that what others do is easy, - that they should just do this and that.

There are certainly inferior nuts and bolts. The New (San Francisco) Bay Bridge is loaded with 'em.

(Hydrogen embrittlement)

The killer feature is open source which allows an excellent channel for the community to get what they want one way or another. Gitlab CI is pretty awesome too, we'll see what other surprises come out in the next release.

I don't like that a company like GitHub has access to all my code and things which may include personal information (I sometimes type things in LaTeX and put it under version control). Running GitLab on my server brings my code under my control. Sounds fair? It's the same reason why some people refuse to use Google services like calendar or photos even though they offer convenience.

Agreed. I think github enterprise is worth it for companies, just like I think a Jira instance is a no-brainer.

For personal/private, I'm perfectly OK with whatever open source solutions are available.

I think it would be a good thing if GitLab or another project could compete with GitHub, but I think we're another year/product from really getting there.

Service as a Software Substitute?

> Github was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader

... GitHub was "SourceForge, but with git".

I mean, I love the product too but let's not oversell things. Free source code hosting and development tools with an enterprise upsell were an established market for a decade before GitHub showed up. They did it better, but I think "trailblazing" is a bit much.

And social networking features, which have proven to be its gold egg imho. Like the article mentions, Github has for many become a defacto showcase for your body of work.

"Github was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader, gitlab can make no such claim."

The idea of first mover advantage is not that we all get together to recognize the first mover and give it our business because we are so impressed by it's first moving ;)

Everybody will have different reasons. Free private repositories is a damn pretty compelling reason for me and I suspect many others.

It isn't even the free part that matters, it is that you can create a new project or add a friend without having to mentally think about how many projects/collaborators you have left.

https://www.b.agilob.net/choose-gitlab-for-your-next-project...

Bitbucket offers unlimited private repos too, but it sucks. This not a strong argument for Gitlab. (I do love it, but for other stuff.)

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