1. Why does gitlab have so many tiers? It would be better if you guys could repackage the features into fewer categories.
2. Why is the Gitlab UI so ugly? IMO, bitbucket and github are leaps and bounds ahead of you guys when it comes to design.
3. Can we get a dark mode for us night owls?
4. Finally, the morality question, You guys proudly associate yourselves with open-source and get help from loads of opensource devs, yet you greedily restrict simple features like epics, burndown charts, roadmaps, configurable issue boards etc. from the core/free categories. Looks like your key core goal is to make money... how are you any different from microsoft or google?
2. This is purely subjective. I quite like the design, both more than GitHub and Bitbucket. They do have a UX team, and they conduct regular user tests. They've also made a lot of improvements and continue to make improvements, but design will always be subjective. You CANNOT please everyone
3. I suggest putting a thumbs up for https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/18596, but ultimately it does create additional work for the UX team so I don't know if they'll end up doing it or not. You could try a user style, e.g. https://userstyles.org/styles/125366/gitlab-simple-dark
4. GitLab is a company and needs to make money to continue employing developers to continue developing their product. Open source devs volunteer their time on GitLab CE, not any of the closed source features, and GitLab has open sourced enterprise features in the past if the demand is high. Also, there is nothing wrong with comparing them to Microsoft, as Microsoft has thousands of open source projects and is quite the open source contributor.
I'd flip #4 on it's head. They aren't greedily restricting features, they are generously open sourcing features and giving them away for free. As a business, they have no obligation to do so.
Being small doesn't mean that we are not in need if advanced features, we just have a smaller scale.
Also as our initial tier was the top tier, and now is the bottom one, I fear GitLab will fence off future functionality with even more tiers at random.
Further, the tiers creates some artificial barriers where we several times feel the some of the new features we receive are just barely functioning and are just there to entice you to upgrade to the next tier.
We are all in all very happy with GitLab, however we are no longer pushing it as a central hub for the company.
You can also try running multiple installations with a separate dev-only instance with more features. Also have you tried contacting Gitlab to negotiate? A few emails can go a long way.
If you consider that the OP has only 10 out of 200 users that need the advanced features, but has to purchase the advanced features for all 200 users for anyone to use those features that is $45,600 a year.
Now if it were possible for example to have a mixed licensing model; buy 10 Premium licenses for the users who need it and 190 Starter licenses for everyone else then that is $11,400 a year. That is a difference of $34,200 a year so it may be the difference between being able to hire another employee or not.
200 employees is not small, that is considered a medium sized business. Millions of companies around the world never get past single-digits. With payroll extending into 10s of millions, $35k sounds rather trivial if it really is powering the company hub and the value that brings.
I'm just curious what your basis for that is? To go with some kind of standardization on the term "small business" I would say the safest definition (within the US) would be to follow the SBA guidelines that define a small business. Depending on the industry a small business is defined by the SBA as a maximum of anywhere from 100 to 1500 employees. So it is not cut and dry that this is or is not a small business; industry and also potentially revenues in millions of dollars would need to be known to determine absolutely if it by definition a small business.
New functionaly is made iteratively starting with the minimal viable change. But they should always function and additions should land in the same tier. If we missed the mark somewhere please let us know.
So while we enjoy GitLab and do some software development, we are not a software company. I think this is becoming all the more common.
Our 275 users are an eclectic mix. There are a few projects that really pound the product, there are lots of internal playground repositories, and even a few non-technical documentation repositories. The requirements are scattered.
I think that that perhaps 25 of the 275 users have need for Ultimate Edition, but that is not possible, we'd have to pay $325.000 for the pleasure. And that is going nowhere.
An interesting question then is what do we do next? Perhaps our innersourcing strategy has to go, and each team will get to choose their own platform. People will chose what they know, and soon most will be on GitHub.
The 250 users who don't need Ultimate are using our GitLab-installation for entirely different things (different projects, different repositories, etc) than the 25 who do.
For example, our training academy keeps a bit of training material in asciidoc format, stored in GitLab, and available to everybody in the organization . GitLab Starter is fine for this need, and this is one reason why every employee has a GitLab license.
On the other hand we have a software project with 6-8 team members who could benefit from GitLab Ultimate. Their needs do not apply to the rest of the company, so we will not get 275 Ultimate licenses for this purpose.
We want (wanted) to have a single GitLab instance to rally around, where we could keep track of all sorts of projects across the company. We went for the Enterprise edition to make sure we could use it without limitations, but we're slowly realizing that it ain't so.
Also, some quick stats: 264 users with altogether 76 groups and 887 projects, adding 5-10 projects a week and 5-10 users a month. We managed to create the hub we wanted, but the hub we bought is no longer catering for our needs, and the hub we need is too expensive.
GitLab's issue tracker and Wiki would be a perfect fit for me to support customers and non-contributors. I really think you should try to make that type of distinction. I would describe a "non-contributor" as someone that generates work for contributors. Ex: Customers submitting issues that a developer needs to fix.
I don't understand the reluctance to make guests free for everyone. If you're worried about existing licenses getting dropped in favor of free guests, you've got a big problem that's going to catch up with you eventually. People don't like paying for things they're not using.
If you think free guest users will encourage people to upgrade, I don't like that either. It's really frustrating to get locked out of features that would be useful to me just because I'm not a huge developer that can afford Ultimate licenses. I'd say that limiting my ability to develop good processes and workflows, as a tactic for "encouraging" me to upgrade, isn't going to leave me felling confident in my choice to use GitLab. Giving me the ability to scale up when I need it / can afford it will.
I want licensing that scales up with me, not licencing that I need to buy if I want to scale up. Get it? I'm already making a HUGE trade-off to move from CE to a paid license because I can't add contributors for free any more.
As a general observation, the way GitLab's cost scales up seems weird to me. If you plot the incremental cost of adding users to (ex:) JIRA, it looks like a hill that gets easier to climb as you add users. If you do the same for GitLab, it looks like a set of stairs (aka steps). Every time you jump tiers there's a huge pricing cliff you need to be able to climb. If the features I need to scale up (my business) are locked behind those pricing cliffs, I think it's risky to buy into that, isn't it?
I really like the way Microsoft does their licensing with Office 365. They let you arbitrarily assign licenses on a per user basis. For example, I can have one user on "Business Premium" and everyone else on "Business Essentials". Have you ever considered something similar?
I feel like I get really good value out of the Office 365 model. To use GitLab as an example, I "make do" with "Starter" because I don't want to bear the cost of an upgrade for every user. With Office 365 I'd simply buy a "Premium" license for myself and leave everyone else with "Starter" licenses.
I would also say that if you ever decide to allow arbitrary, per-user licenses, the first user should get a free Ultimate license. I've used GitLab for 2+ years and I have no idea what features are available in Ultimate. I pretty much live in CE / Starter. There's no way for me to discover the features I don't have.
I'd also be willing to buy short term licenses, if that were an option, which is another reason guest users being free for everyone might be a good idea. For example, if I'm working on a project for 1 month, it would be nice to be able to give a few people access as collaborators / contributors. However, I don't want to "kick them out" once the project is done, so a downgrade to a free guest user would make a lot of sense. As it is, there's no chance I'm buying licenses for anyone because it's annual only pricing and kicking them out when the project is done makes it seem like I don't want to support the project.
To add something positive, the GitLab (product) issue trackers are amazingly well run. I've never run into a problem with GitLab where I felt like it wasn't worth my time to create an issue for it.
I'd like to see them at least become a Benefit Corp or similar to trust more that they won't end up selling out in some worse way that goes against the Open Source values they largely but incompletely embrace.
It's assuming github doesn't do that as well.
As a paying github using, I can see they are improving my life a little bit more everyday.
Like, lately, they introduced automatic security checks on python project dependencies.
I'm glad gitlab exist. I feel safer, knowing I have a place to migrate to if MS screw up with gitup and no commercial replacement lives up to the task.
But github is certainly not playing to loose.
While having no profit does not imply you have insufficient revenue, running your business at a loss absolutely does. So: wanting another company in the same space to have the same kind of revenue profile is extremely questionable; you want them to have a sustainable revenue model, and the ideally on top of that, be profitable.
Still yet to have a day where I havent had a 500 error on gitlab cloud.
We're actively working on making sure GitLab.com is ready for mission-critical workloads. You can see a list of ongoing efforts in [1].
However, we're not quite there yet. At the moment, for mission-critical workloads we recommend self-hosting.
[1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues?scope=al...
I've actually been very impressed. The UI is laggy at times, and they haven't mastered the UX/information architecture like Github has, but they have added a lot of other valuable features.
These are things that GitLab is losing on. Damn thing is so ugly from a layman's perspective, it's probably hard to figure out if they are technically superior because no one uses it.
Private repo offerings are a tough competitive space, too. Everyone knows who Atlassian is.