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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of a poisoned well situation. Whoever would purchase them would lead to the departure of many disgruntled users who basically were with Gitlab to stick it to Microsoft.

I've also never felt compelled to use Gitlab. They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github.

If I started over, I'd go with Drew's Sourcehut hub for the sake of actually shooting for something different.

I don't really see who would pay $8B for this business which has no moat-future.

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Gitlab, GitHub and SourceHut are remotely comparable only if you care just about source code hosting. But Gitlab (and partially GitHub) is so much more - it grew to a beast trying to do everything for your project - project management, CI, analytics, communication... It's not for everyone, but for e.g. startups buying an all-in-one solution could be attractive to reduce the effort on getting all development tools set up and integrated.

SourceHut has an issue tracker (incomplete, but very fast) and CI.

The problem is that SourceHut is not becoming any better over time. With all my respect to Drew, his attention is spread too thin over many projects.

May I ask what does “very fast” mean in the context of an issue tracker?

It means that it's not slow. Case in point: Jira.

It means that user feels the user interface is quite responsive.

It's not a very useful metric. A user having a flaky internet connection with high latency and low bandwidth and intermittent disconnections would complain that the platforms he uses are "slow".

Or a service is just bogged down by too many users but would be quite responsive if not overloaded.

EDIT: I was not writing about JIRA specifically. I agree that JIRA is ALWAYS slow. Ten years ago I had to wait five seconds after a button click. However I also had to handle a complain that something was slow just because that customer's internet was shit.

EDIT 2: I remember ten years ago an especially perverse variation. A friend of mine was complaining about the bad quality of video even after having upgraded his internet connection. The problem was asymmetric bandwidth. His friend had bad upstream and my friend just saw jerky movements and ugly artifacts and it was unusable for communication in a Signed Language.

I learnt that day: if something is slow, then it is not always easy to understand why. My friend was very disappointed in me.

Jira is slow all the time. Sourcehut might, potentially, in contrived circumstances be at risk of becoming slow, but it's so well optimized that it's an outside risk, rather than a guarantee. Surely you understand the difference between the two categories of software?

> A user having a flaky internet connection with high latency and low bandwidth and intermittent disconnections would complain that the platforms he uses are "slow".

On the contrary, a bad internet connection makes it much easier to distinguish slow and fast platforms.

Case in point: hacker news is almost always working fast for me, no matter what crappy internet connection I’m on.

Do you work with video platforms?

Video tends to be bad for the receiver if the sender has bad upstream.

I remember reading SourceHut's creator, Drew, has some controversy around him...

Everyone doing anything has some controversy around them. At some point, we should just stop paying attention to internet dramas and focus on what matters. Like, fast issue trackers or continuous build with a novel feature to ssh into the state, when the build failed (which SourceHut supports: https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/build-ssh.md)

Gitlab does too, IIRC.

He is opinionated. Scroll through his blog, and I'm sure you'll find something to disagree on:

https://drewdevault.com/

It's fine to be opinionated, but he's also very abrasive and you don't have to go far to find people who have had a bad experience with him at some time or another.

That being said, I haven't seen anything egregious for a couple of years, so maybe he's taken some of the honest feedback to heart.

Yep, as a paying customer, I'm still waiting for a way to reach each project page from any other page. Literally the easiest thing to make in the world, but still in limbos...

As for Gitlab and Github, I left ridiculous Jabbascript abominations behind and never looked back; Github now overriding usual keys like PageUp/Down and Home/End SPA style and not being able to display most stuff without JS is the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

I'm not saying I don't agree, but I'm sure they would accept contributions implementing such a feature.

After using gitlab for a year I can boldly claim that it is inferior to github in every feature with subtle things being better in github which add up to a far better experience.

Gitlab tries to do a lot and never did anything that well. It's just perpetually catching up to github.

Pre Microsoft I felt Gitlab was a lot better. It had a lot more features that actually worked. This was an era where Github didn't even have a built in CI solution.

Last time I used it, which was a few years ago now, it felt like Github had caught up and a lot of the Gitlab features were flaky or didn't seem to serve any purpose other than checking a sales tick list. Stuff like integrations that don't seem to really serve any purpose other than to say they are integrated.

> Stuff like integrations that don't seem to really serve any purpose other than to say they are integrated.

I don't think integrations are the example you think it is. The ones I tried work well and make it trivial to setup features that would otherwise feel like papercuts. I'm talking about things like being able to handle gitlab events without having to manage anything or provide your own event-handling infrastructure. If you have web hooks you need invoke or react to, as anyone who runs full CICD and cares about blocked pipelines does, with GitLab you don't need to worry about exposing custom endpoints and write controllers. For many, that is the difference between using notifications or not.

You can't pull a docker image from a private github container registry without a personal access token. Gitlab's group and project level deploy tokens are great.

> After using gitlab for a year I can boldly claim that it is inferior to github in every feature with subtle things being better in github which add up to a far better experience.

I find this remark baffling by how much it contrasts with reality. Others in this thread already commented on GitHub using terms like "mediocre". I wouldn't go that far but I am indeed aware that GitLab feels it works and is expected to work reliably, specially CICD which, unlike GitHub, they succeeded in turning it into a solved problem.

It's even more baffling reading bold claims like "Gitlab tries to do a lot and never did anything that well" when only a couple of years ago GitHub Actions were renowned for not even being prod-ready,whereas GitHub CICD just works and works well without requiring investing any thought into it at all.

The parent's post aligns with my own experience. I've been using GitLab for 2 years after switching companies and I can't think of anything that is an improvement over GitHub.

I never had any issues GitHub Actions for CI stuff at my previous two companies, both which used it heavily. GitLab CI also works fine, though I struggle to see how anyone could strongly prefer one or the other as my own experience is that they basically work the same. Both basically boil down to some yaml you can use to configure running stuff in docker containers.

the rabbit hole goes deep, but both GitLab and GitHub reached parity around that time. (initially GitLab CI simply did a lot more, then GHA kind of took over with the ability to run multiple parallel workflows, and by arguably feeling a bit newer and having better "official" steps ... the GitLab auto-magic CI was ... always completely meh, IMHO.)

but GitLab kept adding the good stuff that Actions introduced, and it can do a lot of things, and with the Omnibus package it's very easy to self-host. (and upgrades are well supported, etc.) ... and of course GitHub self-hosting is only for enterprise editions.

sure, you can setup one GHA Runner on one VM (and each one one a new one), but that's it. nothing else is supported officially.

The point is that it was GitHub that caught up for some simpler use-cases fairly recently, not the other way around. When I started using GitLab 6 years ago it made GitHub look like a toy where you had to reach for external services like Travis to do anything useful.

Fair enough, but the fact that GitLab was better 6 years ago doesn't do much to help the company right now.

I wasn't using GitLab 6 years ago so I can't comment on that, but I can comment that at least since 2022, I haven't found anything in GitLab that would recommend it over GitHub.

> Fair enough, but the fact that GitLab was better 6 years ago doesn't do much to help the company right now.

I don't think you got the point.

The whole point is that a couple of years ago GitLab was unquestionably the market leader and hands down the best service.

And since then it didn't got worse.

Best case scenario, alternatives like GitHub managed to put together similar offerings. That does not mean GitHub suddenly was the best. Far from it. Again, others in this thread used the term "mediocre" to describe GitHub, and this happens years after GitHub started to try to catch up.

To me, GitLab's CICD is by far the absolute best CICD system around. It has been like this for maybe a decade now. The container-centric approach to build jobs, a domain model for pipelines that is extremely simple and yet misses no usecase at all, UX that's unparalleled to the point that, unlike other CICD systems, doesn't even require a tutorial to get the basics to work... Things are so far apart that it boggles the mind how anyone who has any experience in CICD would even mention GitHub on the same sentence.

GitLab was the absolute best 6 years ago and, in spite of Microsoft's takeover of GitHub and rushing to bridge the gap, it still is. That's the whole point.

How is CI not a solved problem with GitHub Actions? I used and loved GitLab CI years ago and remember it feeling better to use than GHA (though maybe I’m remembering through rose tainted glasses), but GHA are just working nowadays, and the ecosystem of pre-made Actions is in good shape.

nope, GHA is still clunky.

self-hosting GHA Runners (plural!) is ... hard (not impossible, and quite doable with enough investment, especially if one takes the dive into the murky waters of k8s), but it's not officially supported. (what's supported is here's a tarball we support these distros ... have fun.)

programming in YAML is still bad, composability is still an afterthought, etc.

For hosted runners that might be true. The best experience I’ve had with GHA self hosted runners was simply using a beefy VPS. At my current job, the self hosted runners were hosted on K8s using Arc and it was a… very unpleasant experience. We switched back to GH runners (turns out the free minutes + a few bucks a month is enough for our use case), but if we need to go back to self hosted I’ll advocate for a VPS.

> programming in YAML is still bad, composability is still an afterthought, etc.

I disagree on that. GitHub actions are as composable as it gets thanks to the ecosystem of actions. GHA is better than GitLab CI in this regard, and probably the best system I’ve used so far. It IS a bit clunky but overall I’ve been pretty satisfied with it.

I also disagree regarding YAML because you don’t program a CI, it’s mostly declarative work. The only conditions needed are a bit clunky to setup, I give you that, but it encourages to either keep the CI simple (no CI needs overly complex conditions), or move the logic to CI scripts in any scripting language.

Thought I'd plug my product because of the mention of actions-runner-controller on k8s. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy :)

It is a terrible experience riddled with many gotchas. I'm making WarpBuild to provide runners (cloud and BYOC on user's aws account) to provide more powerful, faster, and overall much better experience. Try us out - you're guaranteed to save both money and time.

Interesting, bookmarking for later :)

it has to be reusable to be composable, ie. it needs some genericness, customization, etc. that usually requires logic, passing args, env vars, etc.

yes, writing programs (ie. an action) is the correct level of abstraction, but in general it just doesn't make much sense to have separate steps. (because for many cases unit testing and building artifacts can/should be done at the same time ... for example python/rust ... inside a container, download deps, build, then run tests, copy result to new layer, push)

> self-hosting GHA Runners (plural!) is ... hard (not impossible, and quite doable with enough investment, especially if one takes the dive into the murky waters of k8s)

I’m the maintainer of RunsOn (https://github.com/runs-on/runs-on), which solves this problem with far less investment

Been using both for years, and there are definitely CI and CD features that are very great in Gitlab and even better than some Github features

Create a hierarchy of branches/PRs: z > y > x. Merge y. Gitlab will automatically retarget z to x; GitHub will orphan z.

I do wish Gitlab would spend some time better organizing their settings menus, but aside from that it seems to be more complete.

I'm not sure when it changed (sometime this year?) but GH automatically changes the PR base now.

I do stacked PRs for complex changes, and Github has been updating branch bases to support this workflow for at least two years now.

There are a few free open source tools available these days to manage the stacked PRs. Eg: https://github.com/aviator-co/av

> It's just perpetually catching up to github.

That's not how I remember it. I agree that GitHub is ultimately the more polished product, which is why I eventually went back with my personal projects to it... But most of these platform features like CI Integrations, project repositories etc started at gitlab, and GitHub effectively copied them later

Many, many years later.

Having used both for about 9 years I would say that's not correct at all.

Github may have beaten Gitlab to the punch with Pages (whoopee) but CI is a far more important feature, and Gitlab CI existed for years before GA, and continued to be a far superior solution for a long time (and maybe it still is?).

Also, because Gitlab targeted enterprises they had a bunch of features that Github did not. Self hosting, Identity and role based access, weighted issues, project milestones and burndown charts, private issues, support for "innersourcing" of internal repositories. The list goes. Unlike Pages, which is useful but can be replaced by any other wiki, things like role based access to projects are really important. When I switched jobs a few years ago and had to use Github, it felt more like a hobbyist's web-based toy version, lacking a lot of "big-boy" features.

The one truly essential feature that separated them "for the 99%" was CI. Once Github introduced that, it shrunk Gitlab's lead.

But Gitlab are by no means playing catchup to to Github.

Yes. Gitlab CI is still miles ahead of github.

Wholly agree with you. I’ve been using both professionally for years in parallel and have seen the evolution.

Totally agree on CI being superior. The config syntax is a bit of a pain and is aching for some higher level abstraction. But it’s very powerful, e.g. easily supporting cross project dependencies and build status across project in one neat interface.

I also agree that GitLab was optimized for enterprise and that’s where the major feature disparity is. If you are using it only for small hobby projects you will feel that it’s nothing special. I’ve used a self hosted version at a fortune 100 and it was a huge boon to productivity there over GH EE.

> aching for some higher level abstraction

CI/CD components (GA since 17.0) improve the situation a notch: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/components/

Also CI/CD steps

I think the Gitlab experience is slightly better when dealing with collaboration on private repositories with multiple people not necessarily in the same org. Also, Gitlab had free private repo support beyond what Github offered for a long time, so most of my private repos are on Gitlab.

What is so difficult in setting up and integrating GitHub with Jira for example, last time I did it, it was a few clicks?

GitHub also has mediocre issue management and a wiki and we have GitHub Actions as well.

You still need to integrate your cloud service provider with GitLab, which is exactly the same hassle as integrating it with GitHub.

Gitea/Forgejo also has much of that these days.

While being neat binary+sqlite which is turns out tobe enough even for big orgs.

You don't have to use sqlite.

For Github there's a sort of moat that it needs to work across IDEs, orgs, random people, etc. For Gitlab any org using it can harmonize on an IDE and the IDE can slowly introduce all of the CICD/collab with much better code quality and user experience than Gitlab since they rushed to copy Github rather poorly.

Yes, the beast. It's a monstrous thing that does everything and nothing particularly well.

As DevOps engineer I've used and managed both Gitlab and Github extensively, and Gitlab is just so much better. Things make sense there. Shame that it's so darn expensive.

Agreed, used to manage our GitHub enterprise and then lead the transition to Gitlab enterprise. Both cheaper and better, and open source.

When you say managed, do you mean self hosting, or do you mean using the platforms for devops?

I can see how GitHubs self hosting story might be worse, because it’s just not designed for that, most companies don’t do it anymore, and I believe the product is deprecated.

As for doing devops from the platforms, I always found GitHub Actions better than GitLab CI, but I realise many feel the opposite.

Same. Been using Gitlab for years, but joined a new company using Github. I was appalled by how bad everything is compared to Gitlab, but especially ci/runners vs actions.

Does gh actions even support k8s native runners yet?

Looks like it: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/...

> They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github.

I can self-host the community edition for free, and in addition to use it as a software forge and static websites hosting and deployment platform through GitLab Pages, I can use it to manage my users and have third-party services (like mattermost, hedgedoc pads, and other internally developped apps) for centralized login.

I really really hope that the buyer will keep the Community Edition alive, otherwise we'll have to move everything over to something else (I don't know what yet).

If you are using it for work, then it might be better to make everything paid. That would probably also reduce the cost per user, because we would have more users.

Per-user prices would be way to expensive. Thé self-hosted GitLab instance I manage is used for teaching and research. We don't use it to make money in any sort of way. We don't have the budget to pay for it. If we have to pay in the future we'll just (painfully) switch to another solution.

I'd still prefer self hosting CE, but this may be an option for you if it comes to it:

https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/join/

For self hosting I'd take a look at sourcehut or forgejo. They're fully open source instead of "open core".

disclaimer: While I'm not directly involved with forgejo, I am part of Codeberg e.V., so consider that to be kind of an ad.

> They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github.

They literally offer self-hosting at the same price as the SaaS version, which is still significant to some of us.

I'll go rather go back to paper than to just move every last bit of my companies data into the hands of a single company (looking at you, Microsoft).

> I'll go rather go back to paper than to just move every last bit of my companies data into the hands of a single company (looking at you, Microsoft).

To me, given he critical importance of a working CICD, it feels like Microsoft controlling both GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines poses a significant risk of having the proverbial rug pulled from under you. I don't expect Microsoft to invest on GitHub Actions enough to make them the clear winner in UX and cost, for example. Both Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions are appallingly bad in UX, at least compared to GitLab CICD or even CircleCI or Travis, and I don't expect to turn that around due to their incentives to not make either one too competitive regarding the other in-house service. But that's just me.

I wholeheartly agree!

The two best CI tools I've ever seen were Gitlab, as its approch was just working good (tm) and Teamcity, as its approach with the UI & Kotlin integration was just nice.

Then I've seen Azure Pipelines, which seem like an unfinished product because it competes with Github Actions, and then there is Github Actions which seem to come from someonw who loves to write k8s yml files (they do what they do, but they're unreadable).

What makes Github Actions UX bad and what makes Gitlab CICD/CircleCI/Travis good?

I've used 3 of those but I guess not enough to prefer one over another.

Not GitHub Actions but Azure Pipelines: The sheer endlessness of logs, even for the smallest tasks there are hundreds of lines of logs, and it's nearly impossible to find the line you need if something went wrong.

> They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github

so you use Github? if they're the same, why not use the alternative? I just don't understand your negativity given that you don't list any negatives

Not the parent, but I'll bite: they are not the same. GitHub offers significant advantages over Gitlab, while Gitlab doesn't. Therefore I use GitHub. Once upon a time Gitlab had an advantage: they allowed private repo hosting for free. Now it's gone.

>They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github.

Gitlab had many features first. Namely, they had integrated CI way before GitHub did. Their open CI runners are really cool and easy to setup. GitHub had to scramble to put out their Actions product to compete.

I don’t know what the feature comparison looks like today, but many of the innovative features you probably use on GitHub were on Gitlab first. They had a way more innovation velocity for quite a while.

> I've also never felt compelled to use Gitlab. They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github.

I completely disagree. GitLab undoubtedly has the best CICD service. GitHub Actions feel poorly designed and half-baked in comparison to the point they barely feel prod-ready.

It's interesting to read into the thought process of anyone picking GitHub vs GitLab, because, other than being the default with tolerable shortcomings beyond copilot, there is no compelling reason to pick GitHub.

If anything, GitLab's Achilles heel is it's massive Product Management problem. I recall that access to some features like Group Access Tokens were unexplainably removed from free access without updating documentation or even it's UI. Apparently some GitLab PM made a call to pull them out without bothering to check for the customer impact loose ends, and all loose ends were simply left in place for customers to repeatedly pester support without any action.

I use both extensively and lean towards to opposite statement, though not as strongly.

GitHub Actions feels much more well thought out to me. The templating feels less hacky and the workflows via "uses" work really nicely for abstracting common bits of CI config into "packages". The downside is that GitLab CI feels easier to pick up and explain.

On the opposite side, GitLab CI feels like it was made for containers and k8s whereas GitHub Actions feels like it's just a VM (even if the runner software is technically more flexible than that). From a management perspective GitLab is nicer but as a user I often want to avoid thinking about any of the k8s quirks and just have an emphemerial VM to play with.

> They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github.

While I agree with most of your point, I'd suggest that being self-hosted is a fairly major draw for a certain group of people. There's a lot of overlap with the anti-MS cohort, but it's not exclusive. Most of the uses I've seen of GitLab in companies is those who stick it on a cheap VM and never pay for it.

GitHub has had a self-hosted offering in the past, the current availability is... cloudy, looks discontinued, they're trying to move people back online. It was always way more expensive though, targeting a completely different market to GitLab self-hosting.

GitHub enterprise server[1] still exists.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.10/admin/over...

Gitlab CI/CD is miles ahead of GitHub. GitHub is full of magic that you can't debug locally. Gitlab just makes sense and it's purely an orchestrator for stuff you can run locally.

> Gitlab just makes sense and it's purely an orchestrator for stuff you can run locally.

The best CIs are exactly that. Just a task runner, with some reporting capability. Even the reporting capability Github is not very good at.

> I'd go with Drew's Sourcehut hub for the sake of actually shooting for something different.

Or Codeforge (Forĝejo, if self hosting).

Gitea/Forgejo seem pretty snappy and lightweight (on the UI side at least. Reminds me of old GitHub before they went all in on clientside rendering)

It is, it's running fine as a mirror of my Codeberg and Github repos together with Postgres in a RISC-V Qemu VM running Debian, using less than 500MB.

They have a lot of advantages over GitHub as soon as you go beyond the simple task of hosting code and managing git workflow.

The main one are CI/CD Pipelines fully baked in: This is huge. It's fully integrated in the platform. You have full visibility over the CI/CD pipeline. You can even use their own runners.

One reason to use Gitlab is there CI much more powerful than Github Actions. I am converting pipelines to Github Actions/workflows at the moment and some limitations are just a pain in the butt. Like 8 workflow depth etc

gitlab is much more digestible for companies that want to self host. But at that point GitLab the company gets no money...

no corp will use sourcehut. That's just outside of the possibility. And corps have the most money.

Why does it get no money then? The pricing is the same.

Gitlab Enterprise Edition can also be self hosted and they do take a lot of money for it :)

I tried to register for sirhat today and was told I was flagged and should go through a manual process.

Too bad, I like Drew and am benign (despite the skanky username).

Username: sleaze / sleae

> They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github.

In most large orgs I worked for they used Gitlab as their main platform (even though they had uses for GitHub too) for the main reason: they could host it whenever they wanted it and how they wanted, as opposed to GitHub where the only thing you can control is runners.

> I've also never felt compelled to use Gitlab. They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github.

They have exactly three advantages over Github:

1) Ability to self-host.

2) Open Source core (if you carefully avoid all the proprietary features).

3) https://xkcd.com/918/

Sounds good on paper, but in reality you still need to pay the insane licensing fees if you need a usable product. It's like Android, I can download the source code and run it as long as I don't need extra features like a dialer and I don't mind majority of the Android apps not running on it.

If you need a truly open source solution then that would be Gitea not GitLab.

> Sounds good on paper, but in reality you still need to pay the insane licensing fees if you need a usable product.

Can you clarify what you mean by this? I ran a hosted Gitlab instance for a previous company for years with SSO, actions, container registry, on Gitlab CE. I never felt like I was missing anything.

While I'd definitely reach for Gitea if I wanted to be a purist about open source I honestly can't think of a Gitea feature that's not in Gitlab CE.

Their self hosted offering was really good some time ago. I feel like the peak was just after they added CI. Then it got bloated.

If you are trying to introduce source control to a traditional org that haven't been using it ever, then a self-hosted option with CI is a much easier sell than something in the cloud (in my experience).

For any kind of usage that needs github enterprise server, gitlab is a more viable solution in future. Software development infrastructure is important enough and complex enough that a single closed source solution cannot solve all problems.

Bitbucket is alive and well, by the way, and should warrant consideration too.

I used it at work. It's just so damn slow and silly. But it does work and gets the job done.

Gitlab is EVERYWHERE in highly-regulated companies as it's the most enterprise-friendly self-hosted dev platform.

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