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I've been a huge fan of Gitlab in the past, first for their open source nature and second because I felt it was a great product. Their CI stuff was miles ahead of everybody else and was a no brainer. Their main UX was (IMHO) a bit inferior to Github's, but once you learned it it was perfectly acceptable. It was sometimes very slow, but it was tolerable.

But I have to agree with you. The pricing is outrageous. It was already way over-priced, now it is just insane. They shot themselves in the foot hard by making you buy all the things instead of some a la carte (which made incremental adoption highly expensive), and it is impossible to make a business case for adopting Gitlab. In addition Gitlab has gotten slower and less usable.

I still have warm feelings for Gitlab so I hope they will hear this plea: Please, make your prices more competitive and reasonable and don't force an "all or nothing" scenario because you're gonna lose a lot more than you win.

Their open source branding was brilliant.

They’re not an open source friendly company. They’re actively hostile to open source, even defaulting to providing you with a non open-source free version to self install, and making it hard to find the actual open source version.

And their management of the open source repo is also highly restrictive.

Which is their right. And maybe even the right thing to do, but what doesn’t make sense is giving them any brownie points for being “open source”.

Interesting, thank you. I've never tried to run the open source version, so this is good to know.

> The pricing is outrageous. It was already way over-priced, now it is just insane. They shot themselves in the foot hard by making you buy all the things instead of some a la carte (which made incremental adoption highly expensive), and it is impossible to make a business case for adopting Gitlab. In addition Gitlab has gotten slower and less usable.

I've been a huge fan of GitLab for years as well, but this is the problem. Every place I've gone, I could never justify spending money for their paid version. And I so desperately wanted to! Some of that was the ridiculous "all users are paid even if they are just looking at the web GUI and not actually doing anything". But not all.

> Yes, they are adding features nobody asked for like crazy, just to be able to check more boxes in some feature matrix.

This.

If people want "DevOpsSec" then make it a feature or addon tier. I'm certainly in favor of more security and testing, but the few times I've reviewed this feature it doesn't work for our use case. We use external CI/CD services because Gitlab CI (and runners to some degree) don't do what we want. But now, we're forced to pay for this feature as if it helps us. Perhaps Gitlab can't imagine a company that doesn't build cloud connected software.

I moved our organization of hundreds of users from Bitbucket years ago after a week long internal API rate limit in Bitbucket's infrastructure crushed our CI/CD system and took them way too long to acknowledge and fix (of course it wasn't documented). I fear this is the build-up to a similar move again, and I dread it. At the time Gitlab was on a much more impressive trajectory then Github and hence motivated my decision, but this has changed and it's largely self inflicted wound for Gitlab.

Part that pains me the most is I championed the move to Gitlab and encouraged all the teams to double down on it over the years.

Is self-hosting a viable middle path?

This is something I've thought about. We don't really have the resources and I'd rather pay Gitlab to manage this on a day to day.

If we did self host, it couldn't be Gitlab as I fear they'd pull the plug on these offerings as Atlassian is doing[0]. The incentives are there for them to offer self hosting in the short term to grow the customer base, but long term incentives push them to maximize profit via over priced managed services.

And this is the hard part: moving to another solution and self hosting is a ton of work.

Watching the other replies to see what self hosted solutions are most intriguing.

One thing I'm doing now is halting further development of moving things to Gitlab CI/CD so we can better control our future fate.

[0] https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/journey-to-clou...

Not my experience at all, in a similarly sized premium on-prem GitLab. I git-push and the pipeline is running faster than I can get to my browser. Jobs queue basically instantly assuming you have enough runners for your workloads.

I have no experience with using the search. On both GL and GH I prefer to just pull the code and search with my preferred local tools.

Personally I find GitLab CI syntax better to work with than GitHub, particularly if using dependency-based versus using stage-based workflow.

Well, they have an epic for improving pipeline creation, so it's not just me:

https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/7290

The reason it is so slow for us is probably because we use a lot of external includes and trigger jobs. But as I said: the problems start once you scale things up. Then you also cannot just "pull the code" for a search, as we also have a lot of repositories.

And before anyone says "monorepo", GL's cicd support for monorepos is piss-poor too.

Can you expand by providing rough size and GL variants you have used with that monolith.

We did an exhaustive comparison of GitLab vs GitHub, among a few other tools. We had a strong technical preference for GitLab. Performance of runners can be problematic at times but we still don't feel like GitHub is too competitive. However, a 50% price increase is LARGE. What are GitLab users doing to try and justify the cost? We have the ~800 seats and don't want to make a move to something else.

> Yes, they are adding features nobody asked for like crazy, just to be able to check more boxes in some feature matrix. Meanwhile, absolute basic stuff is simply not working or buggy as hell.

Ain't that the perfect description of GitLab. I love GitLab, and do still find it better than GitHub, but because of all the old annoyances, it's really hard to justify to others.

> "Advanced" search is completely useless as you can't really search for code.

@deng - thanks for the feedback. I am on the Product team for our Search service, code search is not where we would like it to be.

We are in-progress on swapping out the backend for code search from Elastic to Zoekt, which should provide a much more reliable and complete set of search results. You can read more about our plans for fixing code search here: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/global-search/code-search...

This is the key deliverable for the team, and we are making efficient progress. If you have feedback on our plans, we would love to hear it. The epic is here: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/9404

I have the exact same experience.