GitLab, on the other hand, has two advantages over Stash. Firstly it's open source (+free). Secondly and most importantly, GitLab is under active development and there is a new release with reasonable amount of content every month.

I haven't installed Stash, but for what it's worth GitLab installation and upgrades have been really straightforward.

Stash seem to have a larger team behind it, with more features, documentation and snappier responses, but GitLab is promising too. I hope they all can be profitable and keep up the speed of improvements in all of the products.

Few pain points about Gitlab, large diffs cannot be merged or diffed through a merge request which is our preferred way to merge branches since you can autoclose the branches from there and provide the per line comments on the diff. The diff display currently has no option to hide whitespace (though they are open to pull requests that implement the `?w=1` convention github does.

Other than that thought I can't say I've had a negative experience with Gitlab.

One of the reasons that we chose Gitlab is because it's open source. We've made some tweaks to it so that it better fits our needs.