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Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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