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Comment by luka-birsa | Hacker News Reader

I've been a user of gitlab for 4yrs+. Its a great tool and a nice alternative to github for all us crazy "i want to have code on-prem" folks.

That being said gitlab ce and its relationship to ee is more and more complicated. What started out at missing select features is now full out armaggedon of lacking features. See latest releases and youll see that all the cool stuff is comming out only to ee.

Whats even worse, the pricing is insane - some nice features are in the extreme tier that costs insane ammounts od money.

There was a time when we considered dropping all other tools and moving to gitlab. Now were actually migrating to jira for issue tracking. We're considering jenkins as alternative to gitlab ci. And if we see the rift growing too large, we'll move to phabricator (kindof sad we didnt go that direction 4yrs back).

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A couple years ago I exchanged email with the gitlab ceo on the idea of developing a few huge macro features separately from gitlab. Basically a strategy focused around using gitlab as a customer acquisition channel to sell other related products. He correctly pointed out this meant having more than one product, instead of two versions of the same product. At the time, I strong suspected mixed feelings like yours would crop up among their customer base. I understand why he went the route he did, but I still think they made an error. Of course, it's his company, so I can't be too critical. However when I think gitlab I think 'github knockoff' not 'open source heroes'. Maybe gogs or someone similar could follow that monetization strategy.

We went Gitlab to Bitbucket + Jira. Quite a bit more power, for less money (even after paying for cloud testers).

I think the Atlassian stack "wins" in the ~200-500 users range for enterprise companies but price doubles if you want the "cloud edition" (read: run on more than one vm). I asked for a few quotes of the gitlab EEU (ultimate) edition and found prices competitive.

You should check out RhodeCode as well. It integrates with Redmine/Jira/Jenkins/TeamCity etc quite well, and it's suited to work for teams of 100-1000+ with enterprise feature focus

Oddly enough we went exactly the other direction. Atlassian user tiers are huge (almost geometric in size) with the result that you end up paying for a ton of unnecessary head count.

The CI obsoleting Bamboo and the collab tools obsoleting the dev features of Jira were icing on the cake. And a true up license model that doesn’t immediately bring all work to a screeching halt when you add one user too many to the app access group in your directory was just the cherry on top.

Normally I’m a huge fanboy of everything Atlassian but the Jira/Bamboo/Crucible/Bitbucket stack just feels very clunky and outdated with Gitlab as something to compare against.

> And a true up license model that doesn’t immediately bring all work to a screeching halt when you add one user too many to the app access group in your directory was just the cherry on top.

Unfeature to me. If you add a new user 1 day before your yearly renewal, the "true up feature" means you pay an entire year's worth of usage for that 1 day. Other apps like LastPass pro-rate, and you would just pay a few cents to add a user for 1 day.

I’ve been wondering why Bitbucket just gets ignored with all the Github news. I get that Gitlab is the new hotness but they’ve been offering free private repos before gitlab was even a thing.

They had a 5 person contributor limit for free repos which REALLY pissed me off.

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