Comment by smithcoin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smithcoin | Hacker News Reader

I was a happy gitlab user for a long time. As ops manager I led the migration from GitHub to gitlab 3 years ago. At the time it seemed like a great decision. Now, as tech director I am looking to switch us back. It is very clear in my interactions with gitlab they do not care about small companies. Their pricing structure is bonkers and has completely catered out the middle. IMHO the jumping the shark moment was the IPO.

I want gitlab to succeed. I’ve spent several sessions with various teams there sharing my feedback and it goes nowhere. I am not arrogant enough that I expect it to be implemented; there are no follow ups even for clarity or to say “thanks but no thanks”.

How is their code search so broken at this point? What features are they cranking out that are more important than making the site usable? Right now it looks like they are solely focused on implementing pricing increases, storage limits and user restrictions. I have had a representative say to me why don’t you upgrade to premium- as if a $99/seat/user/month is palatable to any company or a realistic solution.

I get that companies need to make money, but their approach is tone deaf. They had an issue where pricing was discussed and it ended up changing nothing [0].

I agree with the sentiment in this thread. It seems there are two common themes. 1- the inconsistencies in the UI are frustrating many people. 2- The pricing that probably made them an attractive alternative is no longer there.

I look forward to the incoming PR damage control in this thread per company policy [1], that again will lead to no changes.

[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185

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

In my experience: The UX, performance (objectively: not just in terms of CI speed, which is poor, but Largest Contentful Paint times for most user-facing pages on gitlab.com as well as the average API response time figures for e.g. listing issues are also poor), stability and "community" (I'm thinking of third-party apps, integrations and marketplace for reusable CI components) is strictly worse than GitHub.

Basic accessibility features for colour blind users lagged behind GitHub for years, making it difficult for me to even review diffs and work out what had been removed/added. In the end, I think the customisation feature only got shipped because an external company opened a merge request - and parts of it still fail WCAG AA today.

There's no longer a gap when it comes to GitHub and GitLab in terms of CI support, and I really don't think some of the e.g. Kubernetes integration functionality justifies picking it as the canonical location for an organisation's code.

Recently they've had to start to cut back on storage limits (and had to 180 on deleting repositories to try and free up space), which casts doubt in my mind on their financial stability.

Really though, I'm just fed up of having to put up with using it day-to-day, because clients I work with decided it would be great to pick it X years ago when GitHub wasn't as feature-rich. I now look at companies who cheap out and run self-hosted GitLab/GitLab.com with some suspicion, and question why they're not using the de facto standard tool for the job. I look at it the same as if I found a Java shop that didn't use JetBrains' products for development, it's a red flag.

> I'm just fed up of having to put up with using it day-to-day, because clients I work with decided it would be great to pick it X years ago

This is my sentiment today when using the product.

My own anecdote: I took my most recent gig because of them self-hosting their Git forge and preferring open-source and indie tools to the ones put out by megacorporations.

I'd see lock-in to GitHub as red flag instead of an “industry standard” requiring its employees to give away data to Microsoft, and making all of their code feed the Copilot machine.

That's a reasonable position to hold, but if the goal is FLOSS I'm not sure quasi-proprietary GitLab (the minute you go beyond the basic features in the free version) is much better than GitHub. Some folks have concerns around Copilot but in most corporate settings, employees are going to be using private repositories which are specifically excluded from the training corpus.

I think I'd have more respect for a company using SourceHut or Gitea if their priority was avoiding non-free services. I wouldn't personally filter a company on this basis (though I do have strong views on the operating system I'd have to use), but the demand for software engineers means it's quite possible and I respect folks for being principled.

I prefer it because even with the UI issues, its still better than GitHub.

The elimination of the basic tier is the thing that really threw me off.

I want GitLab to succeed because I want there to be a viable competitor to GitHub. But they've leaned so hard into this "everything in one" shtick that it's now impossible to just pay for them as a GitHub competitor. Their new price point only makes sense if you're also using their issue tracker and doing crazy things with CI that can't be done with GitHub actions.

Maybe there's a market that's interested in this all-in-one stuff, but I suspect most companies already have an issue tracker and are not going to invest in switching, because that causes headaches for years. As for CI, there's definitely a "hardcore CI" market for whom GitHub actions is insufficient, but they already have a solid open source option in Jenkins. I worry that GitLab's lost focus on the git-with-simple-automations market will cement GitHub's dominance for the foreseeable future.

We use it as an all in one but even at that price it doesn’t make sense. The problem with being all in one is that you at least have to execute at everything. I really feel they’ve lost their way in implementing the meaningful things. It’s CI is the only thing that’s keeps us going.

Same here, very unhappy customer. The new pricing is just nonsense, and now I'm looking for alternatives but migrating out 500 users is not trivial.

Moreover, I'm not too fond of the GitLab approach of replacing all the other typical tools in the DevOps toolchain. I'm happy with Jenkins, artifactory, etc., and I don't understand why I need to pay for something I'm not using or planning to use.

Is anyone in the same situation? :)

Yeah, if you want anything you need to build it yourself and raise merge requests and hope they merge it to make it into Gitlab.com.

Even their Gitlab.com runners are still not on par with the Github. You pay $99/month/user and can't even get the same base runner spec as Github instead of you need to pay double the CI minutes to get it. Pretty mad

To be fair here it’s a bit apples to oranges.

Gitlab is optimised more towards running your own runners, it’s natively supported and extremely easy to set them up.

GitHub on the other hand provides you CI which has the possibility to self-host, but they’re sort of awkward to use due to the fact they force you to use odd tags and you don’t get all the features.

Doesn't mean they could have the same level of runner spec as Github.

Especially, when you pay a lot of money for Gitlab. Github std spec is ~7gb + 2vcpu while on Gitlab you need to pay double minutes to get that. They could at least match that for their paid plans.

Personally, I think, Gitlab keeps adding a lot of features but the core CI related functionality seem to get less attention these days.

You really hit the two big problems with GitLab which I wish they would address. But guess they are making enough money they don't care. Sad.

IMO, they are trying to sell a complete end to end experience for your entire company with the aim of replacing a lot of software in your stack with a single integrated system.

IMO they need to do a better job of communicating that for the price to make sense.

Didn't know [0] had been locked. The bullshit edit about creating new innovations to help customers derive more value is pretty much what I expected to come from this.

$100/month is nothing for tooling critical to your (hopefully) well paid staff's productivity. Why don't you pay more?

If the choices were "use no tooling" or "use GitLab at $100/mo" I would agree with you, but GitHub offers essentially the same enterprise-level tooling for $21/mo and has a $4/mo tier that covers most people's use cases. If anything, as others have noted, GitHub's tools are more polished and more reliable than GitLab's.

Why GitLab thinks their product is worth 5x as much as GitHub's is the question at hand, not whether the price point could be acceptable in a vacuum.

I mean the big reason to use gitlab is to self host and/or use their CI/CD tooling. Doing either with GitHub is obscenely expensive and error prone. So I can see why Gitlab is worth more.

Either way, $100/month is nothing. Talk to EEs about how much their tools cost. Software developers are incredibly privileged about paying for anything. If you're spending 10k/month per developer anyway at least, what is another $100?

It's not "nothing". When you have to pay that per team member, it adds up to a vast sum very quickly. Especially when you're required to pay that for everyone using GitLab, even just to use issues or download build artefacts. That's a complete rip-off.

If you consider whether that is delivering value for money, well that's for each team/company to consider. For some I'm sure it is. But for many, and I include myself in this category, it's not value for money given the features and services delivered for the eye-watering cost hikes. It's also not competitive with what other companies are offering, and most of it can be achieved with discrete tools which are of much better quality and which cost less. Their goal of being a total integrated solution is fine--but I'm not sure most people actually wanted that--and that large breadth has come at the expense of depth and much of their offering is better served by more specialised tools. They need to refocus on the basics people want and will pay for, and be competitive by charging the going rate for that instead of 5x the true value.

I'm not averse to paying for what I use. I personally pay for all of the JetBrains products along with some other subscriptions. And my employer pays for other stuff I use for work use. I used to pay for GitLab, but I dropped my subscription because they were asking for too much. The cost has to be commensurate with the value delivered. I get a great deal of value from my JetBrains subscription which I use constantly. GitLab is not currently remotely competitive. Fix that, and I'll resubscribe.

Because its $100 per month PER USER.

Its not worth it. Spare me the sanctimonious "you pay a lot now why not pay more?" - because I'd rather not pay more for something that is not worth it!

Wow, lots of gitlab hate here but at thee same time lots of love. Everyone loves gitlab. I think the core issue is when things become so complicated, you can run your own git server. As I mentioned in another comment, projects like gitea are designed for complicated problems like this. If you are as savvy as you seem to be, spin up a VM and run gitea. A normal VM at digital ocean at $1k a month could handle any conceivable load. Don't 3rd party something you can do yourself for free.

Has anyone ran gitea at a company?

I’m pro open source and run gitea at home, but looking at their issue list and pull requests it doesn’t really come off as a mature open source project that I’d want to run my company from, when down time at the wrong time can get really expensive.

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