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Comment by Fiahil | Hacker News Reader

I believe gitlab's UI has gotten better lastly. Nevertheless, if 99% of the value provided by github comes from their interface, should we remember how much time they needed to implement the "+1" counters on messages?

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Their UI/UX is still nowhere comparable to GitHub's. GitHub is so much simpler to use that GitLab and everyone I talk to seems to have the same opinion. GitLab is still lagging far behind when it comes to user experience, it's just not easy to find stuff.

Well, I find both Bitbucket and Gitlab to be superior to GitHub in the UI department. I haven't even been able to find a graphical tree log of branches and commits on GitHub. ("network" on Gitlab, "commits" on Bitbucket). They also both offer unlimited private repositories (albeit bitbucket has a limit on the number of users granted access, but very cheap pricing if you need to bump the user limit.). GitHub only recently introduced unlimited private repositories on their pricing plans. For years GitHub priced themselves out of our reach (with 300+ private repositories, they didn't even offer this as an option beyond "call us")

I had the same issue with finding the tree log, it's under graphs and called network.

https://github.com/altmany/export_fig/network

That one looks more like an overview of forks between account. Which is nice for open source projects probably, but isn't very helpful or informative for single-repo-multiple-branches. For example, no commit messages are shown by default.

GitHub has a "network" tab under "Graphs" that might provide what you're looking for.

But when people say that GitHub has better UI, they're more talking about the clean menus and intuitive UI. Some of it might just be getting used to one design over another. Although, BitBucket to me has always felt too cluttered.

You can't really compare Github to Gitlab, when the former has a fifth the features of the latter.

Wait did you write that correctly - GitHub has less functionality/features than GitLab?

For example GitLab comes with complete CI and CD functionality https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/

Yeah, much less. As the sibling says, GitLab has integrated CI/CD, extensive code review functionality (which GitHub just added), more fine-grained rules about who can merge what where, an integrated Docker hub, etc.

Is it really necessary though? I've been using bitbucket at work, and their UI is the worst. I mean, you can't even close a PR after a rebase. Yes, it's seriously this _BAD_. So, we're just using cli tools and gui clients, and it works fine.

I understand that people would be annoyed by a forced switch, github has a working issue tracker, wiki, and not to mention the awesome github pages. But, I just think loosing them is not that dramatic.

With their latest revamp? No way. UX-wise it's very similar to GitHub. You're probably talking of experiences in an older iteration or it's just users that were used to GitHub and didn't feel like learning something that looks slightly different.

We're using the latest build at work. I have really like Gitlab's merge request system. Their experience is pretty straight forward and they fixed a lot of the scalability issues with the built-in wiki.

The opening/home page of Github is still better though. What really got people into Gitlab was the self hosting. Github has depended on selling their enterprise version. I was at a talk where Wanstrath said something to the effects of their expensive enterprise version that only people with money to spend need. .. (Years after I left my job at a state university ... they bought a license. -_- I hated how they paid for a lot of stuff they didn't need).

Even though Gitlab may lack in some UI elements, it's more than good enough and it doesn't hinder work. I'm at a shop that still uses the community edition too.

Gitlab and Bitbucket really cut into Github's model. There are more clones out there now too. If you really want a self-hosted Github like UI, there's Gogs too.

We're working hard on making the UI and UX of GitLab better. A good start is this meta-issue [0], but there are many others. We realise we have some ways to go, but this is a major priority for us and 2017 will bring improvements every single month.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/24304

If you need something simple and similar to Github, checkout Gogs/Gitea (Gitea is the community fork which I recommend to use)

Thanks for the feedback! At GitLab, we know that it can be challenging to find things, and it is something that we are working on improving. For example, we are improving our issue search, giving you much more powerful search capabilities (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/21747). However, I know there is more we can do. Please let us know, create an issue (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/new), or comment on this issue (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25752) if you have specific examples of problems or ideas on how we can improve making it easy to find things, or simplify our overall experience.

Agreed. Gitlab's interface is better. Especially the issue board. Throw in their fully-integrated CI platform and container registry basically makes Gitlab a winner.

I'm using both Gitlab and Github for different projects, and I just can't stand Gitlab's interface. Informations are scattered all around the place and there's no distinctive way of finding the information you want. Plus it's slow as hell.

Github's UI makes sense. I can find anything in the blink of an eye and it's blazing fast. The team I'm currently working with is completely fed up with Gitlab.

Are you using GitLab.com or hosting it yourself? We're working on improving GitLab.com, but self-hosting GitLab should be pretty fast in most circumstances.

As for the interface, we're working on improving the design of the product and have just hired a UX Researcher to help with that. Would be happy to hear any specifics you have to offer.

Searching an issue number in the list page's text input should take me to the issue. Sounds small but it's a frequent irritation; I will be 200% happier with Gitlab once it's solved, and my teammates even more so.

If you have Alfred, you can set up a custom web search since issue numbers are in the URL. I have tons of these set up to get to different repos, my global list of PRs, etc. It's that much faster because you don't even need to open a browser or navigate to the page to type in a search field.

Interesting idea, but it doesn't really fit my use case, because I always have a tab open on the issues list page for each project on which I'm working at a given time. When I want to open tabs for issues of present interest, as when reviewing for deployment or preparing a changelog update, it'll be a lot more convenient to do so by searching issue numbers and middle-clicking their entries in the result, rather than the current method of copying a URL to an issue page, then doing C-TAB C-l C-v <end> <backspace> <backspace> <backspace> <backspace> 1 2 3 RET with as many issue numbers as I have in hand to deal with.

Hi throwanem. This is an excellent idea. I've created an issue about it in GitLab's issue tracker so we can move forward with it: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25771

Thanks!

I can't speak for other browsers, but keeping a GitLab tab open in a background tab consistently causes my CPU dedicate 15-25% of its cycles to Firefox.

I do file bugs against GitLab every now and then, but I haven't done so for this one because I assume that there's an existing item on file for this (and I don't care to look for it) and that this is all part of the the longstanding, "Yeah, we really need to work on our frontend story, especially for mobile."

The end result is that just don't keep GitLab tabs open. Which is a little obnoxious, given the well-known issues with how slow GitLab is to complete requests.

Mmm, I found https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/521 but that was a Firefox bug. It is probably something in GitLab but I'm not sure someone filed a bug report for it. We have complete UX and frontend teams and at this moment all the views should work great, also on mobile. GitLab self-hosted should be fast but we're working on the speed of GitLab.com.

Here's another issue about Firefox using 100% CPU https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/342

I agree. I couldn't stand the slowness of Gitlab's UI. I originally came to Gitlab because Bitbucket was lagging on several features that I wanted, and had a poor UI. Gitlab's UI seemed more inviting as it was similar to Github. Mostly though, I chose Gitlab for the free private repositories.

The Gitlab UI is /fine/, but the speed is what gets me. On github, even if I have thousands of commits, the UI is instantaneous. If I click on something, the load time is less than a second for me. So I switched to Github and paid for the private repositories. I absolutely didn't mind paying for this since Github is so fast for me and seems to be adding pretty cool new features (code review enhancements on PR, for example).

I still have one of my repositories on GitLab and it's still slow when I do things like browse commits, view source files, etc.

It's not just Gitlab though. Bitbucket is pretty slow for me as well, though not as slow as Gitlab. I would guess that Github's caching algorithms are much better than either of those two to really make pages seem snappy.

yeah, gitlab _is_ slow. Given that they are (unlike github) actually making money I don't understand why they wont just throw more servers at the problem (or put some devs on fixing their backend).

> I don't understand why they wont just throw more servers at the problem

There's only so much you can solve by throwing more hardware/money at the problem. We have reached a point where we are wasting too much of this, so adding more won't help much.

> (or put some devs on fixing their backend)

We have plenty of people working on the problem, and for quite a while now. We're also hiring more developers to help us out with this:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests?scope...

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25421/

There's also this old (and closed) issue which contains a lot of information: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42

We would love to learn what we can do to continue to improve the GitLab experience. Is there a specific type of information you are having a hard time finding? Or is it about the overall information hierarchy? Feel free to make an issue if that is easier (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/new) or comment on this issue we are using to learn from this thread (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25752). Thanks for the feedback!

You can really improve the GitHub issue board experience with tools like ZenHub [1] - which is further ahead than the GitLab project management experience. This extra functionality is really needed in order to get the PM's buy in to switch from Jira.

The GitHub ecosystem will be the biggest hurdle for GitLab to overcome. (Disclosure - I work at ZenHub)

[1] https://www.zenhub.com/

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