Like what am I missing?
> simply use Github
> Like what am I missing?
But as soon as you do more than that, there is no more 'simply'. GitLab has features GitHub doesn't have, they both have features that aren't 1-to-1 comparable, and price wise if you use the same features on both sides, GitHub tends to cost more. And then there's the whole CI thing where you can't use GitLab CI files on GitHub Actions (but you can use GitLab CI in combination with GitHub repositories but that would cost more), shipping hierarchical organisational structures is either a PITA or not possible and updating all references everywhere on everyones machines is going to suck either way, which eats into the 'simply'.
GitLab used to be a good deal. The bronze tier was 4$ and you had better CI than GitHub at the time. Then in 2021 they ditched bronze and went to the new three tier model, the cheapest being 20$ (apart from the free tier, which however is severely limited). Last year they increased it to 30$, and that does not even include AI features, which will cost you 20$ extra.
So nowadays, there is indeed pretty much no reason to chose GitLab other than self-hosting. We still have license until 2026 and I'm pretty sure we'll bite the bullet and start migration to GitHub before we renew. Sadly, I don't see much of a future for GitLab, apart from being acquired by Google, Meta or similar who can afford to run this at a loss for strategic reasons, like MS does with GitHub.
We're one "they trained the LLM on our private repos and it leaked" scandal away from undermining a lot of trust in cloud services.
There are probably also businesses that end up into compliance scenarios where it's easier to walk an auditor over to the rack and point at the VCS server rather than trying to get the right testimony from the cloud providers.
If this was my company, we would be on GitHub since GitLab Ultimate is super fucking expensive and those security tools are buggy as hell. Not sure if the GitHub ones are any better, but surely they can't be worse. Granted, I don't know how much we actually pay since Ultimate price these days is "contact sales", but I'm pretty sure it used to be like $99/user/month.
(We also wouldn't be paying for Jira on top of GitLab/GitHub.)
That’s my concern, too: there are some appealing features on paper but I’d bet it’s going to be like everything else where you get to debug a convoluted thicket of YAML & scripts when you get out of the simplest use-cases, and you can spend time writing tools to paper over the rough edges. GitHub certainly isn’t perfect but I feel it’s a lot less common that it seems like the developers don’t use their own product.
I… used to like Gitlab, but it’s like they lost their way a few years ago and now I’d never recommend them.
Which, I guess, says something about how expensive it is to run support for on-prem enterprise software. But that doesn't feel like an unsolvable problem, not with a customer field this rich. On-prem focused orgs tend to have wads of cash stuck up in them.
That would account for new sales. Then, lots of existing base because they used to be an inexpensive bundled repo+ci/cd solution. And anyone's proprietary ci/cd ecosystem becomes sticky and hard to migrate from once you put a lot of repos into it, whether that's Gitlab or any other provider. So people don't switch away because it's hard.
Some companies don’t want their source code in GitHub for security reasons.
holes, who gets direct or indirect access to source code.