Meanwhile at Github, $7 gives me hosted private repos. It's free on Bitbucket if I limit collaborators.
The biggest selling point of these services is peace of mind and knowing someone is taking care of the code when I sleep. Otherwise, Git has always been a FOSS.
Definitely. There's not much you can do with self-hosted GitLab that you can't do with pure git. GitLab just makes it easier, IMO. The main reason my company uses it is to restrict the master branch to certain people - doable with pure git, less effort with GitLab.
There's no reason we couldn't use GitHub for this (wouldn't cost much for a team our size), but my company prefers on-prem whenever practical for various reasons.
Self-hosted GitLab doesn't fit all the same uses as GitHub (I wouldn't use it for personal projects), but when it does fit it's great to have.
The point I was making in the original comment was that Gitlab has absolutely no options without heavy onboarding that is hosted as well as reliable. I wasn't really undercutting their on-prem, just pointing out that comparisons with Github are heavily misplaced.
Setting up your own instance is not hard [1], but we're also offering managed hosted instances on GitHost.io nowadays.
If you're still in the middle, you could use the one-click deploy options from providers such as Digital Ocean, Cloud 66 and AWS images [2].
[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42
1. Hosted Git. 2. Reliability.
There is none. I don't know why you seem to be trying to deny it. Your business obviously works with Enterprise. If I was a big corp, I'd be all over you. I'm not sure with Gitlab's compulsion with trying to make everyone happy. Even when they don't have a product that fit a nominal need in market (the 2 points above), they constantly try to insist that they do.
And we're working hard to make GitLab.com reliable, fast and free too.
In my opinion its nice to have the ability to host it yourself and it was the primary feature attracting me to GL, followed by it looking user friendly for a few people I am working with who are not shell people, and what finally sold me is they clearly have a team which is focused on making the product better.
* issue management is better than GitHub's one but for very simple needs (90% of the repositories?) GitHub is enough and BitBucket is needlessly complicated (don't even talk about Jira).
* repository navigation is worse (finding the repositories themselves can be difficult if you land on the wrong page)
* wiki/pages are probably the same
* access control and general management is better
* pull request... I don't know. Our teams are small and normal communication plus git merge are enough.
The mercurial support is great because of legacy code (I finally have come to admit that Git is superior for most purposes). The unlimited private repositories is great because we make loads of projects. I came from so many companies that would have this giant monolithic tree of tangled dependencies because they would check everything into one project. I fear this with GitHub's pricing model.
I find BitBucket's dashboard useless. It used to be decent but they changed it some years back. BitBucket's security was sort of disturbing as well but I believe they have added 2 factor authentication.
I will say that Atlassian's Jira used to be the best bug tracking but I have found that in the last couple of years it has become a complete bloated pig that is overly complex and slow. The hosted Jira is so awful that we contemplated just using BitBucket for bugs. We eventually switched to Youtrack and are loving it.
That said, I've also used it in a paid, hosted environment supporting a team of 10. Again, our needs weren't overly complex and the integration with team software like Jira and Confluence were great (as can be I suppose, given the complexity of both tools).
I'm actually surprised there isn't more of a discussion around bitbucket and the cost of hosting smaller, private repos. Do most just dislike bitbucket or are you hosting bigger projects with multiple contributors which requires Github / gitlab services?
Is this a joke? I mean for people looking for free private Git hosting, there is Bitbucket. This statement is like saying "free, but not really, really." The fact is if I want hosted Git hosting from Gitlab, I cannot reliably get it without paying at least $390 upfront for their EE plan. Too much smokescreen, too less actually on offer.