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Comment by chapati23 | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: Besides more traction among the open source community, where do you feel GitHub is stronger than GitLab?

I’m not affiliated with GitLab, however a little biased because we’re using GitLab instead of GitHub at our company.

Feature-wise, It seems to me that GitLab is running circles around GitHub. Curious about other opinions.

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I like GitHub's UI better. I'm not even sure what is the latest iteration of GitLab UI. They change it in every release and it's a mess. I still can't find stuff.

Also, GitLab is slow. I'm sure that gitlab.com service would not way handle a fraction of GitHub's traffic without a complete rewrite or something like that.

I like GitLab as we have a CE installation that we depend on and I want it to be successful (which it already is I think). However personally it feels worse than GitHub on casual use.

GitLab's UI is in every way a travesty compared to GitHub's.

GitLab feels like using GitHub's UI from about 3 years ago. Here's a list of things missing, just to name a few:

    > consolidated reviews
    > multiple assigned people
    > reasonable diffs when merging complicated changes, ability to review code since it was last reviewed
    > easy to create merge requests, and plenty of context sensitive stuff
    > can generate comparisons of code online without creating a merge request

There's so many small UI/UX pain points

Take https://gitlab.com/coldnight/ci-test (which was the trending repo when I visited....):

    > The navigation is spread across:
      > The very top
      > The left hand side
      > An inline breadcrumbs below that
      > A bar in the middle of the screen
      > A bar below that
    > History button duplicates Commits button.
    > About 30% of the top of the UI is just useless filler - so the content on the page (the tree and the README - which is probably want I want when I visit a project) also consists of a small box in the bottom of the scren.

Compare https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data (which is the top trending repo on Explore on GitHub!):

    > Much more consistent navigation - series of contextual bars which move down - so each page is more consistent

    > Much more of the screen is available for the tree / README

Hi richardwhiuk, GitLab team member here.

We appreciate open feedback, thank you for these UI details. We are very aware of the lack of polishing of our current project home page and missed opportunities. There is a specific issue on that we are working on for a July release right now, see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/44704. This is a first step of the larger effort we are tackling to improve the overall experience via https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/62. Please feel free to check these out and comment in the issue.

Regarding our navigation, we feel confident that the experience has been greatly improved with the new 10.0 UI. See https://about.gitlab.com/2017/09/13/unveiling-gitlabs-new-na... for some context. I’d like to encourage you to get involved and let us know what you think! You can always create an issue to contribute improving the GitLab experience.

Andreas Product Manager

The network effect. I haven't seen it mentioned too much, so it worth thinking about it. The majority of the users won't leave and it's still one of the best places to collaborate with developers.

There's tons of search traffic going to GitHub issues.

The only reason some of my clients (of my own company) and some of the clients of my employer (so.. someone else's company) choose GitHub over GitLab is track record. GitLab isn't old enough with a long/stable enough track record to be considered on par. Feature- and functionality-wise, GitLab always wins.

A small, but second reason some of my clients and workgroups choose GitHub is pure because of the brand name, but I suppose that could be thrown in together with track record or age.

My company also uses gitlab, while it is visibly slower that's not a huge problem. For a smaller teams it's just a matter of throwing a decent server with a lot of RAM and the problem disappears. At least for my team it seems to be good in However I'm not sure how it would perform with significantly larger loads.

GitLab is definitely slower. But the bigger problem for me is simply that the UI is unfamiliar. I'm honestly not sure if it's worse, it's just that I'm very used to Github by now. It's a bit "rock and hard place" for GitLab as I imagine they don't want to just carbon copy Github.

That's it, the open-source community is there. Performance doesn't really matter when there's tons of amazing projects being hosted in one place. If features were important, Gitlab would be more popular than Github.

Ehh, I think the community would move to a better site if there were distinguishing features. From a source-viewing and code-review perspective, they’re all more or less the same: basic.

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