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They integrated in-repo configuration, self-hosted runners, composable workflow definitions, a robust API, and container building and registries for the first time in a CI tool.

Of course GitHub came and blew that out of the water with a composable social actions ecosystem. Which was brilliant and remains the killer feature that puts GitHub far beyond reach of other CI platforms, especially now that they've improved in-repo composability a few months ago.

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> They integrated in-repo configuration, self-hosted runners, composable workflow definitions, a robust API, and container building and registries for the first time in a CI tool.

Out of those, I think only "composable workflow definitions" would be one of the features that other CI platforms didn't have, before GitLab even existed as a project. You might want to re-read the history and features of build platforms before GitLab.

I'm very familiar with the history of CI platforms before GitLab, having used Hudson, Jenkins, Circle, Travis, Appveyor, Codebuild, and a whole bunch of other platforms extensively. While some of them had these features, none of them had all of the features, few of them meaningfully integrated the features together, and most of them provided the features in a very half-assed and unreliable way.

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