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Comment by aynyc | Hacker News Reader

When was GitLab ahead of GitHub? I've been using both for as long as I remember, I always thought GitLab is more marketing than GitHub. Believe or not, I prefer BitBucket because I don't care much for CI integrations.

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While you might not value it, GitLab’s CI story was for a long time way better than GitHub and even a number of dedicated CI/CD providers. If you want to build and deploy microservices from a monorepo independently based on what changed in a PR, for instance, then GitLab supports that out of the box whereas you need to hack something together yourself on Buildkite.

GitHub actions has significantly reduced the gap, and at least for me that was GitLab’s killer feature.

Meh, there is something to be said for having "anything" over "nothing", but as with many of GitLab features, you inevitably found yourself deep down some years old issue of theirs to find why something is broken or obviously nonsensical. That's before they went batshit insane on development of even more unfinished stuff, while the core ergonomics (Lint CI button anyone?) continue to border on unusable.

Ironically GitHub actions are now the vastly superior experience, despite the lack of bullshit checkbox features. Turns out you don't need so many of them beyond the basic "run something on a worker" flow.

Just give it a little more time and GitHub Actions will have feature creep too.

Ah, I see. I never bother with CI features. I was playing with all the CI providers when they came out. Never truly got comfortable with them to run my personal projects. At work, we can't use those anyway.

Thanks for pointing that out!

There was a tiny period where github was a bit stagnant and gitlab felt more capable. Felt a bit like mysql vs postgres. Now I think github got the lead back (slightly simpler UI/workflow). But i don't know much.

Yeah that was before Microsoft bought GitHub. GH had been constantly exceeding expectations and GitLab trying to play catch up (which smells of bad product strategy).

Gitlab CI pipelines are miles ahead from Github Actions or Circle CI.

As someone who’s used all three for years, I am curious why you feel Gitlab is superior?

The developer experience of GitHub and CircleCI feels better in every way from my perspective.

That was true several years ago, yes, back when GitHub Actions was super new and pretty crappy...

I remember Gitlab having some features that Github lacked and subsequently ripped off, such as merge queues.

also free private repositories, the github free tier used to be very lacking to say the least

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