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Ask HN: GitHub vs. Gitlab?

65 points by ghettosoak ↗ HN
After much deliberation of pulling the trigger on the 7 $/mo private Github account, I'm leaning heavily towards Gitlab.

EDIT: I'm setting up a private repo for an upcoming project, and I'd like to run the issue tracking through some git service, potentially scaling to include a Kanban Board. Not sure if it's gonna be just me or other devs. This looks promising:

http://kanban.leanlabs.io/

I've set myself the challenge of being as financially prudent as humanly possible, especially with this project, as it is an extremely low budget.

If Gitlab can offer free private accounts, with a couple cool features thrown in on the side, why shouldn't I use it?

Which do you use? Why not the other?

PS – I'm not from Gitlab, I'm just some hacker trying to lock up his stack. :)

112 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] thread
mtmail
Why do you lean heavily towards Gitlab? It's easier to make a recommendation if we know what your priorities are. Are you using it for you job? How many public repositories do you have, how many private?

Check out https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing as well.

abfan1127
I've been using Bitbucket for private repos. Its interface is not as intuitive as Github, but its good enough for me.
MichaelBurge
I use Bitbucket for private projects. It comes with a little issue tracker, although I just use a Google doc for task tracking.
mattferderer
Have you tried out Atlassian's JIRA software? It's free for up to 5 users I think.
dreamsofdragons
Jira is great if you have the time to learn and customize it, but I wouldn't recommend it to a single guy with a single repo. You really need multiple roles with multiple workflows for it to be of value. It's overkill for a team of 5 or less.
MichaelBurge
My last corporate job used JIRA. I'm convinced that smaller teams will be much more productive with a looser issue/task tracking mechanism, like a Google doc or Trello board.

One of the smaller teams used this, and it seemed to be more helpful than harmful:

https://kanbanflow.com/

KayL
Loved Google Doc also. I used to use Trello until I figured out anyone in team able to delete the card items, therefore I couldn't track back the history.
willejs
trello (free) + github (3 free private repos or $9 per user per month for an org)

Gitlab works, and is decent, but only in certain circumstances.

Pay for SaaS products wherever you can and makes sense. Only build/host your own things that deliver you business value.

jttam
I am contemplating a move from Github to Gitlab right now. Feature-wise there seems to be enough parity with Github to make this sort of thing possible.

Also, gitlab's CI system is attractive and being able to run our own runners in our own environment (we currently used an outsourced CI system.)

We're also doing it because Github enterprise is too expensive, and we want to rely on less external dependencies in our environment.

johnhaquiti
I'm using Gitlab for CI at the moment, it makes things much easier. I miss some of the simplicity of GitHub however. If you are using CI I would recommend got lab.
sytse
How can we make GitLab simpler to make you more comfortable?
dglass
Gitlab's servers have been slow in my experience. Sometimes taking 10-15 seconds to push up a new commit. I got tired of waiting and moved everything back to bitbucket.

Both gitlab and bitbuckets source code browsing is slow and a little clunky. GitHub's source code browsing is definitely the best.

sytse
You're right, we have to do better on performance.

We solved most of the time waiting when pushing a new commit, see the API timings slide on https://www.scribd.com/doc/316471059/GitLab-Infrastructure-2...

The web interface is still slower than we like. We've doubled the team of performance engineers and we're making progress, see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59 and all issues labeled with performance https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&sor...

dineshp2
At a high level, what are the major areas where you face performance issues?

Does the choice of RoR play a part in performance problems?

Can performance be improved by deploying more servers?

PS: I really enjoy using Gitlab, and would be ready to replace Github with Gitlab in my workflow if the performance improves.

connorshea
My understanding (as a frontend engineer, so I'm not as intimately familiar with the problems as some others are) is that the biggest bottleneck at this point is with the file system.

We're working on switching to CephFS which looks very promising. See the relevant issue for more info: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/1

I can get someone from the backend performance team to comment too if you'd like :)

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
dineshp2
> I can get someone from the backend performance team to comment too if you'd like :)

Sure!

> the biggest bottleneck at this point is with the file system.

Would something like AWS EFS [1] solve the problem?

It might not be a practical solution from a cost perspective though. Eg: for 50TB of data at $0.3/GB/month

  0.3*1024*50 =   $15360/month
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/efs/
pcarranza
The main issue with this is that this would be a vendor specific solution that would lock everybody.

We build a product that you can host yourself. If we only solve the scaling issue by pushing it down to a specific vendor, then there is no actual solution.

The way we are facing the problem is first by enabling a really easy and simple form of sharding (that would solve most of the issues that a lot of big customers may face), and then by using an open source underlaying filesystem that can scale reasonably well.

pcarranza
Hi dineshp, I'm Pablo Carranza, and I am currently leading the effort on infrastructure at GitLab, this includes performance.

> what are the major areas where you face performance issues? > Does the choice of RoR play a part in performance problems?

RoR does not play a part in the performance problems as much as any other language choice. Our performance problems come from at least 3 different fronts: lack of caching in some specific points making us call the same complex/slow operations many times, NFS (filesystem) performance as a whole, and algorithms that worked really well at small scale, but not anymore, both at app level and at DB level.

I think that RoR is a really good option for building a product fact, and eventually it is necessary to start specializing specific parts that do not perform anymore, and just replacing what cannot be specialized. The key element here is that we need to measure first to see where the problem is.

> Can performance be improved by deploying more servers?

Not really, more front end servers means more load on the NFS backend, so there is no easy solution here. The first step into fixing this issue right now is this one: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/139 and then we will start playing with a distributed FS as a longer term solution: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/1

As a final note, we are using some specific issues to measure performance as a blackbox, and those issues are seeing some really good progress lately. So stay tuned :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czes-oa0yik

gcb0
github cheats for performance.

our github enterprise will not bother try show diffs on some pull requests if you changed more than a hundred lines or so. very worthless.

my workflow now is to always check the diffs locally because i don't trust theirs.

never used gitlab or bitbucket a lot so i don't know if this treachery is there too.

sytse
I assume you're referring to GitLab.com specifically. We also don't show large diffs, but I think the limit is thousands of lines. In the upcoming release (July 22) we're working on a collapsable diff feature https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/14103 to make working with large diffs easier.
kannonboy
Bitbucket engineer here!

In Bitbucket Cloud - i.e. bitbucket.org - we cap the diff size for pull requests at 10000 lines.

In Bitbucket Server we also cap the number of lines in a particular diff at 10000 by default, but you can override this number[0], along with all other timeouts and thresholds with our various configuration properties. One of the engineering values of the Server team is "no hardcoded constants" - so you can configure basically any property that you like to suit your particular deployment.

Both Bitbucket Server and Cloud also generate a subtly different - and in our opinion more correct - diff than you'll find in GitLab and GitHub. Bitbucket actually creates a hypothetical merge commit between your two branches and shows the diff between it and the tip of the target branch. This means we can nicely render merge conflicts in the UI, and show how your target branch will actually be affected by the merge (rather than just the changes on the source branch). I wrote an article that discusses our merge algorithm in more depth[1] a little while ago.

[0]: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/bitbucket-s... [1]: https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/01/a-better-pull-r...

edit: correcting my previous statement on diff sizing in Bitbucket Cloud

joeseeder
I moved most of new private repos to gitlab.com from bitbucket. It's nice to experience interface parity between self hosted and public gitlab. And more and more of my clients move to self hosted gitlab as well.
sytse
Thanks for considering GitLab. The different scrum boards for GitLab are detailed on https://about.gitlab.com/applications/#scrum-boards For GitLab 8.11 (August 22) we're planning to ship a kanban board with GitLab itself, see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/17907

What we hear most frequently a reason for switching is the in the integrated CI, CD, and container registry. The GitHub importer will import your repo, issues, PRs, milestones, labels, and wikis http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_projects...

kannonboy
Bitbucket engineer here. Not to derail, but since Bitbucket has been brought up a few times in this thread and we're talking differentiating features this seems relevant: Bitbucket also has native Docker-based CI/CD in the form of Bitbucket Pipelines[0].

[0]: https://bitbucket.org/product/features/pipelines

rchhabs
Bitbucket supports kanban boards today. Checkout our integrations page [0]. Two of our partners Comalatech [1] and Transition Technologies SA [2] both built simple solutions that display your Bitbucket issues in a kanban board.

Full disclosure: I'm Head of Product for Bitbucket. LMK if you want to chat, a link to my calendar is in my HN profile.

[0]: https://bitbucket.org/integrations/cloud [1]: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.comalatech.bit... [2]: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/bucketboard/cloud/...

choward
I'd just gitlab because it's open source. You could run your own gitlab servers if you wanted. You don't have to worry about vendor lock in unless you use the paid features.
kannonboy
One of the nice things about Git is that it's an extremely portable data format, so vendor lock-in between Bitbucket, GitLab & GitHub isn't too big a deal. There may be a little project metadata that needs to be migrated using an importer, but your source code will always be inherently transferable. It's one of the big reasons Atlassian decided to partner with GitHub on Git LFS[0] rather than pursue our own solution: we didn't want to reduce Git's portability by creating multiple competing standards for large file storage.

[0]: https://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/10/01/contributing-to-git-lf...

raiso-lo
We ended up with RhodeCode for internal repositories. It is open source as well, but in our case, security (we're a hedge fund) is critical. None of the other platforms were able to correspond to our needs. Besides, RhodeCode has a nice community of developers: https://community.rhodecode.com
xemoka
I quite like GitLab, although I'm using it self hosted on premises for our team. Honestly, it's overkill and I wish Gogs had been more evolved when I initially picked up GitLab.

I have not really tried GitLab's hosted offering, I have a couple repos up there, but nothing extensive.

Have you considered a VPS with Gogs? It's super lightweight and easier than snot to setup.

aeorgnoieang
It looks pretty nice. In fact, it looks a lot like GitHub.

Funny tho that they host their own code on GitHub. Is that just because they don't want to pay for hosting? (That's sensible.)

marcinkuzminski
Have you checked our RhodeCode ? It's much more mature that Gogs.
atomi
I really like the mirror feature on Gogs, the Gogs ui, the easy deployment using Docker and that it uses Go so the memory and cpu usage is quite low.
marcinkuzminski
RhodeCode has the same feature called remote repos. You can create a repo from remote one and that pull changes via a button, or api call. You can even use credentials inside the url which are then encrypted inside the database
atomi
The Gogs mirror updates automatically. I only use it to mirror public Github repos so I have them in case myself, Github or the project goes offline.
xemoka
That's cool, I hadn't seen RhodeCode before, I like that it's python (preferred over ruby, although I'd treat both as black boxes anyway). I'm not a huge fan of the interface though.... although if I had known it existed at the time I probably would have picked it over GitLab. Shame.

I'd probably still pick Gogs though... we're not a big team and many of the features provided by GitLab and RhodeCode are above and beyond what we require. Basically, our implementation is me finding a way to force version control onto a team that, for some reason, wasn't using any form of VCS at all.

lnalx
Gitlab is overkill too for our team and the best open-source alternative to Github is Gogs. It miss code review support and protected branches but features are on the road !
haukur
I prefer GitHub myself. I tried using GitLab for my private projects, but their service is usually very slow. Taking 15 seconds to load a page is just not acceptable, in my opinion (this is not an exaggeration - their average page load times seem to be at a minimum of 5 seconds). If you don't want to pay, though, it's one of the better options. Their integrated (also free) CI service is nice. However, the UI/UX is not very good. It can be difficult to navigate source code and between issues in their issues system.

$7 for a GitHub account with unlimited private projects is a pretty good deal, especially compared to their previous pricing tiers. I also think the experience of using one website for most open source projects as well as private projects is better.

jswny
I still use GitHub but the best thing about GitLab for me was the integrated CI (which is amazing), and the fact that you can host GitLab on your own servers.
magic_beans
Why not Bitbucket, which is free and private?
spapas82
+1 for BitBucket - I'm using it without any problems for many years!
mightykan
Atlassian has become much less of a caring company since they’ve gone public (or are preparing to). They’ve completely ruined SourceTree on Mac (an unnecessary interface redesign that took functionality away which still hasn’t been fixed almost 9 months later) and have been very careless in HipChat iOS client’s updates (shipping crippling bugs and not fixing them). They also used to be very friendly to feedback on Twitter but now are completely silent and don’t help or comment at all. Atlassian might’ve been a good company at some point but they aren’t any more. I’d rather use a fully open source solution that is mostly developed in the open (GitLab) than to be locked into a proprietary package (GitHub) or a downright user-hostile option (Bitbucket).
farkas
Would love to understand more about this. I doubt it has anything to do with us going public. I can understand some of your other points (though I'd love to spend the time to explain our perspective if you would like), but "user-hostile" in bitbucket I don't understand.

Happy to engage further if you email me. scott <at> atlassian.com.

Scott Farquhar, Atlassian CEO

alcoholiday
Switched to gitlab @ work from github (the enterprise edition) and it's been much nicer. Really appreciated the integrated CI/CD support, and we're just about to start using the built in container repo.
cp9
github's where the people are. Everyone already has a github account. Either way git itself means there isn't too much vendor lock-in, just the ancillary parts of the project (issues, wiki, project site)
sytse
The network effect for user accounts matters most when you have an open source project with a large audience, for private projects it is less important I think.
stephenr
I still find this argument hard to follow.

You have a person who wants to contribute code to you open source project, but that person is stymied by requiring an account on a service other than GitHub.

What kind of people are you expecting to be doing drive-by code contributions and what kind of code quality are you expecting from them?

zardeh
"I don't want to have to jump through hoops to contribute to your project".

I've made a few OSS contribs that were fork, clone and edit locally (or edit online in one case), push, test, pull request.

That was all, they took ~20 minutes, if that. Adding in "create an account", "figure out the new UI's method of forking/pulling", and "link myself to another random webservice that I'll only use once" is too much friction, I might spend as much time setting up the account as actually making the edit.

Sure, if I'm planning to become a contributor to a large project (like, say python, which isn't on gh), I'll go ahead and make an account on the bugtracker and join the mailing list and learn how the hell mercurial works. That's fine if I expect to make 10+ commits to a project and really delve deep into it. But most projects aren't big. Most projects aren't that interesting. OSS thrives on people fixing the one bug they encounter (seriously, look at the bus number of major projects). Adding friction in the process is bad for that software.

dmitry-k
@zardeh Totally agree in that adding friction is bad. At Rhodecode, we tried to eliminate it, by creating a dedicated page for contributors (https://rhodecode.com/open-source) and allowing to login via GitHub / BitBucket.

One more point: although the contributions are not made for the recognition alone, a bit of it never hurts. We ended up with a badge system for https://community.rhodecode.com , where code contributors get rights to moderate discussions (since they ARE the core users of RhodeCode).

hosh
Github's UX is very polished. Having tried Bitbucket, it's not at parity when it comes to UX.

I have not tried Gitlab so I won't comment on that. I will say, however, Github has put a lot of work into the pull request interface and being able to examine code. This matters a lot more when you are working with a team (though it assumes you know how to take full advantage of it). I'd look at Gitlab through that lens, and if you are working solo, the cheaper solution is probably OK.

felixangell1024
I much prefer GitHub or even BitBucket over GitLab. GitLab was insanely slow. A lot of the features GitLab offers still didn't persuade us over something that was minimal, worked well, and was fast. I'm also not a fan of the UI/UX, it's kind of confusing what certain icons mean as opposed to a simple fixed with layout like GitHub.
sytse
Edit: This response was meant for another comment.
connorshea
We put a lot of thought in our most recent release to improve the UI/UX, so some of your problems with that may have been resolved since you last used GitLab.

As for performance, we've started treating speed as a priority, and we've been tracking progress in various issues:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19273#note_12...

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59

We'll keep improving over the next few months, lots of work still to do.

felixangell1024
Yes! I've been seeing a lot of great improvements being added to GitLab recently. I'm intrigued to see what the future holds, and could definitely see myself switching in the near future.

With regard to UI/UX improvements, I'll have to check it out and see how much it's changed since last time :-)

connorshea
If you have specific issues with the UI/UX or find any bugs, feel free to open an issue and mention me (@connorshea) :)

Personally the performance issues have been super annoying for me when using GitLab.com, so I've been doing what I can removing unnecessary assets and things, making the page size smaller.

One huge improvement recently was speeding up the Files view, I used to actually avoid it because it was way too slow, really bad experience.

We all use GitLab.com every day to develop GitLab, so we're very much aware of the problems!

RomanPushkin
GitHub. It's like McDonalds, may be you don't like it, but you always know what to expect. Moreover, you'll find lots of tools that already integrated with GitHub (for example, https://waffle.io).
philtar
Except for private repos it's the most expensive choice.
mattdennewitz
For me, Gitlab's slowness (both in pushing and in browsing) is offset by a great feature set and very solid pricing. The issue with speed has never stood in the way of productivity. I made the switch for personal projects because I didn't care for the extra private repos tax GH levied.
spoiledtechie
I know your looking at GitLab, but with a small team and small free accounts, I think you should probably look towards BitBucket instead. It has a lot easier pricing than GitHub.
gtaylor
Only thing to keep in mind with Bitbucket is that they seem to struggle to keep things running smoothly. Just spent a year working at a company who used Bitbucket full time. Their git servers were slow or down at least once a month, and we never knew if our webhooks would fire on time or at all.

I can't recommend them for anything serious.

bbrunner
I really enjoy GitLab. Very easy to setup and does what it promises. I will say that it's slower than I would expect but I haven't found that to be a deal breaker for me personally. Probably depends on your workflow and how much you do locally vs. in the UI.
connorshea
Disclosure: GitLab Frontend Engineering Intern

Some benefits for GitLab.com, in my opinion: GitLab.com has free public and private repos, only limit is the repo size (max 10GB, for comparison the Linux repo is ~1.5GB). Also includes completely free CI :) Plus everything is out in the open, and CE is entirely open source!

Regarding performance, we've gotten that feedback from a lot of users, and we're working very hard on improving it[1][2][3]. I've personally been working a lot on decreasing the page size, chopping off a ton of extra unnecessary assets to make things download and parse faster.

Would be happy to answer any other questions you have! Hopefully this doesn't sound like too much of a sales pitch ^_^

[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19273#note_12...

[2]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42

[3]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59

zacmps
Just a note, Github now has free private repos as well.
pritambaral
Just checked the http://github.com/pricing page in disbelief. No, Github doesn't have free private repos. One has to either be a student (and use Github private repos only for education purposes) or pay a minimum of $7/mo to have even a single private repo. When paying $7/mo., of course, one could have as many private repos as one wants, but $7/mo. isn't free.
copperx
If by "free" you mean "included in the paid plan," then yes.
philtar
This is the closest thing I've seen to pulling information from one's ass.
questionr
what's the current version of gitlab running on GitLab.com (not the self-hosted)? And how can we check this in the future?
sytse
GitLab Enterprise Edition 8.9.5-ee 42dceaa, you can find this at https://gitlab.com/help
questionr
thanks! where on that page would it be found?
sytse
At the top, maybe only visible when you are logged in as a security precaution.
sashk
Three years ago my answer would be GitHub. But since then I've been forced to use (and manage) Gitlab. Within that time, I fell in love with Gitlab and it simplifies many of our tasks. We are using self-hosted instance and worth every penny we spent on it's license. (Gitlab CE was enough, but we were looking for few features available in the EE).

So now my answer is self-hosted Gitlab.

sytse
Thanks sashk for being a GitLab user for 3 years. That is a long time and I hope you found that GitLab got a little better every month. Thanks for posting here, I really appreciate it.
ottobretz
http://www.phacility.com also known as phabricator is really nice. you should give it a try.
xuejie
Totally agree, to me Github and Gitlab are so similar that there really is no point in arguing which one to use, just pick either one and you should be okay.

On the other hand, Phabricator is a solution that contains a much more variety of features, which might be suitable to certain teams.