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Comment by benburwell | Hacker News Reader

I really want to like GitHub Actions. But it feels like every time I'm trying to get something done, they are broken.

The problem that I've found is that no other CI/CD provider has feature parity to GitHub Actions & integration with Git. Sure, there's external providers (Travis-CI, Buildkite, etc) but none of them feel like they have the polish of GitHub Actions. GitLab & Azure DevOps also don't compare at all - I've migrated whole organizations off of both because they just don't feel polished / break rather frequently. So I'm personally stuck with GitHub, simply because no other company provides anything better.

GitLab CI is definitely competitive with GitHub Actions. What's the specific feature set you're missing? "Polish" is pretty vague, especially in the context of a post that laments GitHub Actions' poor uptime record.

Gitlab IMHO is definitely in parity, if not better. I've had loads of success with it at a few places now, using basic stuff right up to full Autodevops with custom buildpacks for Elixir/Pheonix.

I have the exact opposite experience. GitHub CI is probably the worst CI I've used so far (except for custom homegrown messes), and Gitlab CI by far the best.

GitLab CI isn't even on the radar. I'd take Actions or Buildkite anyday over the existing offerings. I'd argue the GitLab CI ecosystem is non-existent.

Wow! I’ve heard GitLab CI is hard to learn because it’s so expansive, but never that it is non-existent. Do you mind sharing more?

It's patently wrong there is no community, I've been part of it writing buildpacks.

GitLab team member here.

I'd recommend starting with one of the workshops listed here [0] and maybe dive into more learning resources and the documentation.

Our community platforms, such as the forum [2] and Stack Overflow, etc. [3] are also a great place to ask questions and collaborate on challenges.

[0] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/learn/

[2] https://forum.gitlab.com/

[3] https://about.gitlab.com/community/

When I talk to Hashicorp or AWS they provide tooling specifically for GitHub Actions. I don't see the same level of vendor commitment when it comes to GitLab. If I'm not going to get vendor commitment I might as well run buildkite which is awesome or even look to something like Tekton for Kubernetes if I'm just doing Kubernetes anyways.

Gotcha, that makes sense. Thanks for replying.

Not at all true. GH actions are about as simple as they can be and can be replaced by mostly any other commercial service that does the same. Also, any CI/CD tool can integrate with GH.

Wouldn't it be nice, 2 years into these hiccups, if GitHub could explain why the same problem keeps coming up?

There's a point where it's funny, and we're way past that.

They did shed some light into their internal struggles https://github.blog/2022-03-23-an-update-on-recent-service-d...

That's not about Actions though, right? That's about the core mysql for repos.

Actions relies on the main MySQL database, as do many other GitHub services

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