HN Explorer

Ask HN: GitHub vs. GitLab paid plans (2017)

12 points by petecooper ↗ HN
I've reached the point of needing 3rd-party git hosting and I'm looking at a shortlist of GitLab and GitHub.

Use case is straightforward: front end developer, team of one (me), small chance I will need to handoff of repo to a client in its entirety once or twice a year, along with written confirmation there is no trace on my system.

The paid plans are virtually the same $-wise (both single-figure $ a month). They also offer a whole raft of stuff that I can compare and contrast for as much time as I care to.

I've run GitLab CE on a Raspberry Pi 3 internally. It's been a bumpy ride with some of the recent updates, but nothing catastrophic has happened. It was a bit touch-and-go on some updates freezing my Pi, but the experience has given me a good insight into the GitLab UI, workflow and the like. And it's fine, actually.

GitHub. I do some open source things, and all the projects I'm involved with are on GitHub. I have no reason to doubt their paid-plan product is fine. Different to GitLab, of course, but fine nonetheless.

Which leaves me at this odd decision: the $ value is trivial, and the services are both fine in their own way…

…which doesn't help the decision process.

And so, I come asking for your advice and feedback: GitHub or GitLab?

Thanks for reading.

17 comments

[ 551 ms ] story [ 699 ms ] thread
dudul
Why are you even considering paying for gitlab? What feature do you need that is not available in the free edition?
petecooper
Good question. The CE version is fine for me, especially if it's hosted on gitlab.com, but then if something goes wrong I'm working on the basis that paid plan holders have a higher priority for getting fixed.

That might be bogus logic, I don't know -- it's more of a gut feeling.

dudul
The CE version is open source. I would argue that the gut feeling would be that it gets fixed faster than the enterprise version. Maybe not deployed as fast though.

Anyway, I would just go with GitLab regardless. It is more of a turn key solution than GitHub. You can set up automatic builds, use project management tools, etc.

petecooper
>The CE version is open source. I would argue that the gut feeling would be that it gets fixed faster than the enterprise version. Maybe not deployed as fast though.

I should clarify: I was referring to infrastructure issues rather than code quality. If servers go offline, I'm assuming the paying clients have a higher-grade SLA to no-cost clients, even if it's a few hours different.

ValentineC
> The CE version is fine for me, especially if it's hosted on gitlab.com, but then if something goes wrong I'm working on the basis that paid plan holders have a higher priority for getting fixed.

The basic GitLab.com plan is free and runs their EE version, and yeah, it looks like you can get 4-hour support with their Silver plan [1].

(I haven't been keeping track of GitLab.com's features lately, but I'm glad they're charging for features that aren't essential to indie developers like me.)

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/

dkoston
As a solo developer, wouldn't all these git repos be on your local machine as well?

What risk are you trying to avoid?

If gitlab or github is down and you have the repo locally, you don't have an issue.

If you've already handed off the repo to someone else, that's on them to store it and it'll likely be under their account.

I guess it's not clear from your intro what features you use 3rd party git hosting for other than backing up your repos.

Are you submitting pull requests to clients? Tracking issues? Other?

petecooper
>As a solo developer, wouldn't all these git repos be on your local machine as well?

Yes, multiple machines.

>What risk are you trying to avoid?

I wouldn't say there's a perceived risk as such. I've run my own git infrastructure until now, and I want to stop doing that. The risks I've had were with GitLab CE updates clobbering my server (happened three times now), which then involves a few hours of rebuilding.

>I guess it's not clear from your intro what features you use 3rd party git hosting for other than backing up your repos. >Are you submitting pull requests to clients? Tracking issues? Other?

Tracking issues, yes - lots. Pull requests to clients, that will come very soon with external hosting. CI is not on the shopping list at this stage, but may be used if it's available.

brudgers
Bitbucket is another option. Between the three, it is probably the one with the least incentive to monetize repositories in a way that leverages vendor lock-in because Atlassian has other diverse revenue streams and appears to have a fairly stable business and solid management.
kiloreux
This, I have been using bitbucket for the last few months and have been a more than happy customer. They have been redesigning their website UI/UX and so far using their tooling with pipelines for testing and deployment have been more than reliable. Totally prefer them over gitlab but I do still use GitHub for OSS of course.
atsaloli
There are two support levels for GitLab EE (Enterprise Edition) users: Starter (response by next business day) and Premium (response within 4 hours).

As a GitLab reseller, I offer HN users 10% discount on GitLab EE. My email address is in my profile.

The pricing plans are at https://about.gitlab.com/products/

james-skemp
I'm paying for GitHub (lowest level) but use Gitlab a lot more these days.

I like GitHub's UI a lot more, but the University I work at uses Gitlab CE, so I've gotten used to it. Their permissions setup is particularly frustrating for me, on .com. I want a single option to make a repo completely public and there isn't one.

Gitlab's CI service is fantastic, and the reason I've jumped on board, since now I host all my sites on it, after moving to Hugo and Jekyll.

However, GitHub seems to have better uptime.

I don't think you can go wrong either way, and you may not even need to pay given what Gitlab gives away for free.

krob
Who needs to pay when you can startup a simple droplet / linode instance / lightsail / <VPS> of your choice and setup phabricator. It's not exceptionally complicated, written in a language that doesn't require complex configuration, can poll repo updates from remote servers, can additionally host repos. Also used by some major companies & open source projects. Uber, wikimedia, freebsd , redhat, KDE, Blender, Dropbox, Quora, Disqus, Khan Academy, LLVM, Cisco Systems, Bloomberg. So it can't be that bad.. I use it every day, gets the job done, and I don't have to ask someone else to do a pull request.
petecooper
Valid point. The $ cost per month of a personal paid plan is, to me, enough to let someone take care of the hosting for me. I've run my own git servers for a couple of years, and now I want to pay someone to do it.
superman1985
I would not use either of those. GitBlit is FREE and gives me everything and more that any paid service offers. It's been several years and I still have not had the need to switch to paid git hosting. The ONLY feature that I miss from GitHub is pull request commenting. Other than that, there is basically no difference.