There's Almost No Gitlab | Hacker News Reader

There's Almost No Gitlab

julien.danjou.info

38 pointsphysicsguy72 comments

"If we compare GitHub’s $2 billion revenue to GitLab’s $579 million revenue for 2024, this is a 1:4 ratio, which is already pretty huge."

I think GitLab having a quarter of the revenue of GitHub is incredibly impressive, and makes me take GitLab a whole lot more seriously.

Do they have 1:4 ratio of expenses though

Its probably more like 1:2 or 1:3. GitLab has 2,300 employees, and is fully remote. They also take advantage of an international labor force being fully remote [0]. Github probably benefits from Microsoft's real estate portfolio, but they do have offices, they have almost 6k employees and probably a lot more corporate bureaucracy[1]

[0]:https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/

[1]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub

Revenues per empoyee:

- Github: 2 bil. revenue on 6K employees = 333K/employee

- Gitlab: 547 mil. revenue on 2300 employees = 237K/employee revenue

interesting, github is more efficient on that metric ... scale matters I susppose

BTW, 2/0.579 = 3.45, so if you are going to do any rounding, you should round down to 3, not up to 4 :)

Especially after they were ragging on french developers for "not understanding ROI".

And the final paragraph is the kicker: "I’ve nothing against GitLab, and their software might be pretty good. All we know is that they’re outsiders, while a lot of the tech market in Europe seems to think that betting on GitLab is the best go-to-market strategy."

Sounds like they haven't even evaluated gitlab? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. At least I've heard of Gitlab! If your advice is not to cooperate with outsiders or to even evaluate their offering, well... The French have amazing marketers, but they suck at writing coherent blog posts ;)

Yes, I agree it's probably the right choice for them. Companies using the GitLab CE would probably never buy Mergify anyway, not only because they don't want to spend money, but also: if they can live with the bare-bones GitLab CE, I can't imagine why they would have the need for Mergify.

Regarding market share of GitLab, I would also assume that it's not looking good, but I only have anecdotal evidence. At least we (350 premium seat license) are definitely looking to migrate away from GitLab, for various reasons, but mostly cost. It seems the Premium tier has become the ugly step child of GitLab, but Ultimate is simply way too big a step cost-wise. Also, the new AI features have a hefty additional cost, and at least for coding, Copilot is superior in my experience. Combined with the overall bugginess of GitLab and missing essential features like proper code search (yes, I know, they will ship with Zoekt any day now), it's in a bad spot now compared to GitHub.

EDIT: I forgot one very important additional thing: GitLab was attractive in the EU for regulatory reasons, as GitHub was US hosting only. But since end of October, GitHub has EU hosting generally available:

https://github.blog/changelog/2024-10-29-github-enterprise-c...

AFAICT it doesn’t matter where things are hosted, the US still reserves the right to access the data because if the company or the parent company are based in or want to deal with the US.

Or has this changed somewhere in the last 4 years since I looked at it?

That might very well be, but what are you gonna do? Forbid using Microsoft cloud services completely? As we say in Germany: that train has already left the station...

With Trump in power, the train is running in reverse at full speed )

Yes?

It’s more a viable possibility than it’s ever been.

> Or has this changed somewhere in the last 4 years since I looked at it?

See perhaps:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Safe_Harbor_Priv... (expired)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU–US_Privacy_Shield (expired(?))

> The EU parliament raised substantial doubts that the new agreement reached by Ursula von der Leyen is actually conform with EU laws, as it still does not sufficiently protect EU citizens from US mass surveillance and severely fails to enforce basic human digital rights in the EU.[7] In May 2023 a resolution on this matter passed the EU parliament with 306 votes in favor and only 27 against, but so far has stayed without consequences.[8] The NGO NOYB (European Center for Digital Rights) has announced that it will once again try to set the Framework out of force in front of the European Court of Justice.[9]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU–US_Data_Privacy_Framework (in place)

Same in my work. We would happily spend weeks settings things up and then hours maintaining it over months, without proper backups and with abysmal security, just to save few hundreds of bucks.

I never understood that attitude, but I'm not the one who makes financial decision and tinkering with stuff is somewhat fun for me, so I don't really complain.

Even then, GitLab is super heavyweight compared to just running Gitea. Gitea is a million times easier to set up.

Chiming in to request HN's current take on Gitea vs. Forgejo.

I think they are both great choices and it's a matter of personal preference.

Do you distrust the new for-profit company that owns Gitea? Do you believe that all software should be libre? Choose Forgejo.

Do you believe having a for-profit company behind gives the project more budget for feature development? Do you think that using a GPLv3 licensed software is problematic in legal terms? Choose Gitea.

Does Gitea offer features like continuous integration, pages, user permission management, etc?

> continuous integration

Yes: https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/overview

> pages

No, but if you have some sort of static content hosting set up (like a S3 bucket), it shouldn't be difficult to set up publishing to that with actions. It's also got project wikis built in.

> user permission management

Yes: https://docs.gitea.com/usage/permissions

I have maintain our Gitlab instance for the last 5 years. Zero issues, and I do a sudo apt update once a month. So I guess some people thought using the manual setup was the way to go?

I can confirm that upkeep of Gitlab is rather easy and does not take much time. Just the occasional update every few weeks. For its size it is also quite robust and the integrations it offers work well.

The only thing I can really complain about are the constant UI changes that do not actually improve anything. I fell they are just changes for change's sake to keep some frontend devs busy.

Gitlab itself was kinda pain free, but having a bunch of dedicated local runners was a bit annoying in 2019ish. It mostly worked (with k3s) until it didn't.

Which repo are you getting your GitLab .deb packages from?

Also, Debian/Ubuntu OS security updates happen a lot more often than once a month. I suggest just using unattended-upgrades, it can even auto-reboot at a convenient time of the day after Linux kernel security updates.

This is fine for our use case, because the GitLab instance is not exposed to the internet.

It's pretty simple psychology to me - By playing around in the SWE equivalent of Home Depot all day while making a gigantic deal about the various tool manufacturers and current promotional offers, we can avoid being on the actual job site or dealing with any customers.

It's actually very easy to understand.

Employee salary is fixed expense your company is always prepared to pay every month.

Buying new software is extra new cost, which needs justification and procurement process.

> Ten years ago, GitHub was behind on certain topics (hello CI), but they are now way ahead of the competition.

This is an absolutely wild statement to me. I find github actions to be really terrible for any reasonably complex CI flows; gitlab's CI is the primary reason we use it instead of github. If github's CI was worth a damn we'd certainly be there; as it is we mirror a bunch of repos to github just for discoverability.

Same. GitLab CI isn’t perfect, but it is quite excellent and GitHub seems very rudimentary in comparison. At my job we’ve been using GitLab CI for a few years now. We did an analysis of what it would take to move to GitHub and the answer was on the order of hundreds / thousands of person-hours and there are some things we just couldn’t port, period.

Agreed. Github Actions are the wonkiest, Rube Goldberg shit I have ever worked with.

Have you tried it in the last year? It’s far ahead of anything else on offer, including products that do just CI.

It’s like they’ve been laying low and learning from everyone else’s mistakes, and then boom.

Github pretends to celebrate open source but actually is not open source (Gitea or Gitlab are at least partially).

Github is owned by a company with, some might say, in the long run a terrible track record.

Github is starting to get slow and heavy.

By the way, congrats to GitLab for its $579 million revenue and kind of staying in the race. It is not easy to compete with the borg hivemind nowadays...

> Gitea or Gitlab are at least partially

Fwiw: Gogs, the project gitea forked from is still being maintained and continues to be just plain open source.

It doesn't have full vertical integration though (built-in ci etc)

https://github.com/gogs/gogs

Gogs is fantastic.

A single binary, easy to setup, blazing fast. I also love it looks and feels like the old Github.

The argument seems bad for the reason that if you take it to the limit it's self defeating. Moving to GitHub because it's cheap right now and is popular at some point results in even more GitHub dominance which then translates into higher costs as they have market power.

Running your own Gitlab instance or your own instance of anything really is by definition more upfront expensive but also a hedge against future costs. Cloud deployment is one example of it. There's been a pretty significant move back to on premise because that's the exact dynamic that played out.

If there's a French cultural element to it it's not "people in France can't calculate costs", which is both patronizing and obviously stupid, it's that the French have a healthy skepticism of outsourcing their infrastructure to people whose decisions they have no control over.

I don’t know, I’ve worked in companies using GitHub having to halt everything twice per month due to GitHub outage,and some other Doing pretty well with self hosted GitLab inside a vpn, factor the cost of having the devs stopping twice a month in the cost of GitHub.

That's anectdotal.

I'd argue that the risk of your own instance being inaccessible for whatever reason is significantly higher than GitHub or GitLab having a full outage.

What exactly would Mergify bring to someone using a Gitlab instance? This is the first time I hear about the tool.

I scanned their homepage briefly and it seems that Gitlab already does most of the stuff they mention, including the AI stuff that's so popular right now. "CI Issues revolutionizes the way teams handle CI problems by leveraging the power of AI to automatically detect and surface issues." Yeah, ever heard of the /summarize command?

So in conclusion, it seems to me that if people want to pay for something to improve their Gitlab experience, the money would be better spent on a Gitlab licence to unlock additional features.

Excellent read of how things go in the EU about SW. Some places are different, in Germany the LOVE to put price to the hour, but still don't see that technical debt will have interest to be pay at the end.

It's not about pricing at all, GitHub is way more attractive with just 4$/user/month.

I think the predominant factor is data governance and information privacy. A self-hosted GitLab instance is mostly good enough, until you don't want to self-host it anymore and change to a cloud hosting service of your choice. It's just that not a lot of privacy aware people want to pay Microsoft for playing around with their data.

SE in France, 10y+ experience. I’ve never seen a company choosing those tools with any consideration for privacy or security or for any given reason.

In all of the companies I worked, the "basic" tools (aka mostly GitHub, Google Workspace, Jira, Slack etc …) were all just default choices from the era when the company was fund and then those things just became the base bricks of thousands of internal procedures and scripts and once the company is at cruise speed, nobody will want to change any of those tools even if "better" (for whatever definition) or cheaper tools exists.

Because it’s just too hard.

And somehow, by some amazing magic I don’t understand, at some point, people are happy with the fragile stack of hacked things running on top of 4 or 5 extremely "shitty" (for whatever definition) products that you can’t cancel.

SE in Austria and Switzerland, 10y+ experience.

I won't disagree with your assessment that the tech stack changes rarely or ever, but newly founded companies are still picking GitLab fairly often. AFAICS every business wants their tech stack "moved to the cloud", but infra people weight the costs and still have good contacts to local data centers from the pre-cloud-era - you know, contacts with a phone numbers and human support. Those data centers made it a business to run GitLab instances for you, among other things. A lot of businesses choose a discounter like Hetzner first and then move to one of those when support matters.

That is mostly the best overall price (direct and indicrect costs) for the offered value, data governance included.

Price is not everything. My company has Gitlab licenses as a part of a larger Microsoft enterprise agreement/partnership but we still pay for GitLab Ultimate and use that as a default for all developers.

Why do authors feel the need to include AI generated images like this? Are they even real people?

I would rather have competition in this space. Especially if I were offering the product Mergify is offering. I'd be shitting my pants that the functions that my product offers will soon be added to Github natively.

We are a ~70 engineers company in Spain, using on-prem Gitlab. One engineer in fully dedicated to the dev + maintenance of our CI/CD pipeline.

Due to a large & spread code base (~1000 repos) and rather complex testing and deployment needs (we sell research robots: many different platforms, each of them with customer customizations), Gitlab has been an excellent platform for us, that we can easily shape to the needs of our pipeline.

The dev experience is also great: pushing one tag essentially turns code in ready-to-install Debian packages in a test environment, followed by one additional click on a Gitlab pipeline to send the packages to production.

We could probably do that with github as well, but I would not underestimate the convenience of having the whole platform accessible and available at our fingertips.

TL;DR: we won't move to github any time soon :-)

Our engineering team is based in Europe (mostly Paris). We do use self hosted Gitlab but we pay the Gitlab Ultimate license. I think Gitlab is indeed quite popular here, and smaller companies do use the CE edition until they feel they can afford the paid version.

Not implementing everything customers ask and focusing on supporting only one platform/forge and do it very well is very respectable, but I don't feel the explanation given by the author of the article is very convincing.

Poor gitlab marketing team having to deal with an blog post like this on the front page of this site lol

Side comment to the screenshotted tweet. You can like open source with out making commits. It's nice to just be able to read the code or take something and just run it or fork it privately

I don't follow. You won't support gitlab, because people who use it won't spend money, instead preferring to support github, which is cheaper than gitlab across the board?

He is talking about people self-hosting GitLab (so they aren't paying monthly fees to GitLab), and comparing the Engineering hours + server uptime costs + related costs to just paying for GitHub (which is cheaper).

I assume he's talking about people self-hosting gitlab CE since the paid versions cost the same regardless. But if that's the comparison, then I would expect to compare to folks who exclusively use github's free offering.

No, because hardly any companies would use github free, so I think the comparison isn't too bad.

The "no costs" is a wild argument to me though, because I've seen "we want it locally available" and "we can't put code in the cloud/"laws"" etc, but never "this is cheaper than a couple bucks per month"

Yes, it's a strange argument in my opinion. He also argues that almost all open source projects live on Github, but those don't pay money for dev products either.

I see a lot of people here misunderstood the article. It's not an attack on Gitlab in any way. Or taking the side for Github or Microsoft. It talks about business decision, not ideological one.

If anything, it's attack on French bureaucratic processes that make it hard for employees to ask for something to be purchased. Or it's a cultural thing, once you're employed you're a fixed cost and your hourly rate is not analyzed anymore in purchasing decisions.

The results are the same. It's easier to spend 10 hours on a free thing than to get approved a purchase for something that costs one hour. Numbers are just an example, don't know how they hit this specific case.

Therefore, when considering market for your software, it's not only about demand and usage, you have to take into account whether that demand comes from those who are willing to spend money. The fact that 50% of developers in France use Gitlab, doesn't mean much if they're not willing to pay. If above the average (compared to other countries) 50% of usage is specifically because of the free self-hosting option, it preselects those who will spend time instead of money.

Anecdotally, sales of my software in France, or for that matter in Spain or Italy, are 10x smaller than sales in Netherlands, or Sweden, much smaller countries. maybe it's a language thing, as some countries are know for excellent levels of English, and some not? But since my software is for developers and IT people English shouldn't be a barrier for them, so I suspect cultural and bureaucratic reasons are the main culprit.

Don't really see what point is being made here.

No real criticisms of Gitlab itself, just someone being weirdly upset about being asked to support more than 1 git hosting platform because some people don't want to buy into Microsoft's ecosystem and trying to argue that you should just use Github purely because it's more popular and more profitable, with the obligatory ugly AI-generated image at the top.

There is no point. It's a fluff piece, a thinly veiled atempt at getting their product to the HN front page.

Weird article.

In any case, GitLab still has some advantages over GitHub. DX, UI and UX of GitLab CI is better than GitHub Actions. And one massive one - you can actually have a complex organisational structure without weird ramifications. In GitHub you have orgs and projects; in GitLab you have orgs, namespaces (which can be nested!!) and projects, and you can move projects around with automatic redirects. That means that you can actually group projects together, have them share CI configs, secrets, etc. In GitHub if you want to separate or group stuff, you have to create extra orgs, which results in extra SSO and token configurations.

Yeah, GitLab Community self-hosted is pretty popular in France and more widely in Europe. That's because it's good and does its job, and it's actually quite easy to maintain, and it's entirely in your own control (how often are GitHub down? Did they train their LLM on your code? Are you beholden to US foreign policy and sanctions?). Having been responsible for running GitLab for a small to medium sized org with very heavy usage for a few years, I'm extremely convinced we got better ROI and uptime than paying GitHub.

French engineers might go a bit too far on the DIY with free software route, but on the other end American engineers go way too far with "let's just buy another SaaS for this small thing" IMO.

I really didn't realize that it has 25% the revenue of GitHub.

Ironically, GitLab auth is currently broken. I try to sign in via GitHub and am served a 422 Auth Error page. Perhaps they don't have many users that use GitHub to sign in, or perhaps the sign in page isn't tested? Whatever the case, the first button I press on their website being broken is exactly the same feeling I remember when I tried GitLab for the first time about 8 years ago.

> GitLab auth is currently broken. I try to sign in via GitHub and am served a 422 Auth Error page

I think you are mixing up Gitlab and Github?

You can Auth on gitlab using github…

The weirdest thing is when I search for GitLab integration or bots, but I _always_ see them hosted on Github. Maybe this is just because GitLab has still god awful Google indexing.

Author misses the point of self-hosted GitLab and conflates for some bizarre reason "self-hosted" as "free"... no, you still have to pay for it but it's not beloved VC "saas" model.

And in Europe topic of data governance is very much a thing...

Gitlab is pretty good, it's decentralized and it's open source. Frankly we should see less centralization at GitHub and more gitlab instances.

In particular after the US election - Github is owned by Microsoft and they love training their AI on your code (which i don't mind for open source projects).

I don't think anyone argues that it is bad, Just that it's expensive to run when taking into account engineer-hours

I don't understand how the election is relevant to the topic.

Here are some keywords for you: Digital souvereignty. US cloud act. Industrial espionage.

Someone who doesn't want to spend, is calling others who don't want to spend cheap. Classic.

GitHub is cool, no hate there. I have ran a custom software development company.. so I was expected to send my customers who don't know how to use Github, to Github? We used Gitlab and it is much easier for us to support our customers. We use it heavily at CodeConductor.AI also. We will support GitHub, BitBucket and anything that speaks git.

Github market is big enough, and they pay. You are fine. No hate on Gitlab though, bro.

So you evidently see a demand for Gitlab support (you can barely reject the requests at the same rate they come), at the same time you claim that there is simply no market for it?

Yeah, this is a very strange article that completely contradicts its headline.

I start to recognise idiots when they start talking about absolute stuff, like "freedom of speech means you can say everything" or "developers don't know anything about X" this confirms my rule

I think the argument is supposed to be about ROI but it didn't really drive the point home:

They don't want to invest in integrating their product in Gitlab, because it's 1/4 the size of Github and they see trends pointing to a Github resurgence.

If you have limited resources to build integrations then sure, I guess?

Seems like a classic case of someone making a decision based purely on personal opinion (I don't want to support Gitlab because I don't like it) and then working backwards in an attempt to find arguments to support that decision (and really struggling in this case, "50% of the developers I spoke to used Gitlab, but Github's profits are higher so clearly Gitlab is irrelevant" is particularly egregious)

Sounds to me like

    We don’t support Linux because the low marketshare on sales.

Because you don’t provide a native port, support and don’t even sale? Which is why your own special MBA market sales don’t change.

And that why a lot of people suffer from bad software - it was the first known and they don’t think in long term.

PS: GitHub is usually not an option for closed-source software. Not because of the uncertain development of the fees. Microsoft’s security track - especially for the cloud - is bad. And if you lock yourself to cloud services you end up in vendor lock-in. And that’s also open-source projects tend to Gitlab and others. As usual, GitHub was the first big player.

I think the article was trying to say that everyone running Gitlab is running the free version so they aren't a market with the necessary expenditure to be buying addons to the free product.

This is like freemium^2. People aren't buying gitlab licenses because a) too expensive [1] and b) not needed for the functionality in the free product.

[1] "too expensive" is in the eye of the beholder and requires visibility of ROI, COGS, and development velocity.

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