Can you give concrete reasons why you switched to GitLab?

As a engineering founder myself, I think just copying GitHub and uncutting on price (developers are notorious cheap) is not great innovation. Though, if there are specific features that GitLab does better or has over GitHub willing to hear those.

I pay $50 a month to GitHub (two organizations) and that is still amazing value for a tool that I use ridiculously and daily. Anybody who complains about GitHub's pricing is well...

I use gitlab because it is free and embodies ethics inline with my own. There has been a conversation that has appeared to be largely one-sided-- developers asking for more features, control, consideration ect; and it github largely seemed to be ignoring these concerns. A large group of popular open source contributors wrote an open letter to github and even then, there was not much change until gitlab responded.

Github is a much larger organization, and it does a lot of good. However, I like gitlab, they are engaged in the community, really love their users (thanks for the tshirts btw!) and they do things like this-- apologise for their mistakes and listen to their users.

So yes, even though they both just copied open source software created by linus torvalds, the great innovation is building a community around that infrastructure, to which I think gitlab is doing a better job at present.

Ok few things I'd like to address.

    "...developers asking for more features, control, consideration ect; and it github largely seemed to be ignoring these concerns."

Users will always ask for more features, or a specific functionality that addresses their single pain point. Rushing to add these things causes technical debt and dilutes your product. Beautiful products should be simple. The right approach is to listen to users and figure out the root cause of their pains, and then perhaps decide if the need is big enough address it.

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." — Steve Jobs

    "So yes, even though they both just copied open source software created by linus torvalds..."

Ok have to stop you here. The git protocol and cli indeed was written by Linus, but git never tackled how to bring it into a beautiful web interface. git never brought social interaction (issues, pull requests) into coding. GitHub created a lot of innovation in their product and technically.

right, I was driving home the point that, even though github didn't build git, they didn't simply copy it.

> git never brought social interaction (issues, pull requests) into coding. GitHub created a lot of innovation in their product.

Many people feel like they stopped innovating here, and thus they choose gitlabs. As a startup, it has to answer the question you asked, and it has to work extremely hard to win developers, add features, and draw distinctions between github and gitlab.

The steve jobs quote doesn't make sense. In your example, if numerous people switched to android right after they offered the features ignored by apple, it would be pretty obvious they were important.

I don't dislike github. I actively like gitlab. You can choose whatever one you want. I personally am a gitlab user for the reasons above. These are subjective, but many seem to embrace them.

I couldn't disagree more.

> A large group of popular open source contributors wrote an open letter to github and even then, there was not much change until gitlab responded

What is a large group? Is large 10 people, 100? 1000? What is a popular open source contributor? Name me one that was on that list? What is not much change? Was there no change? Or was there not the change that YOU wanted? Also what exactly did you think will happen? Someone writes a letter today and tomorrow all the features will be implemented out of nowhere? Things take time and if you want to make them great, then maybe even longer. The fact that there WAS some change since then is evidence enough that GitHub did take it to heart what was in that letter.

By the way... GitLab is fucking slow. They are so bloody slow that it is painful and as a developer my time is too valuable to waste it on badly implemented software that I have to use every day. The issue has been raised many times and GitLab still didn't do anything until today to speed up their bloody service. So if anything then GitLab hasn't done anything until today except being a bunch of cheap copy pasters. Lol

GitHub and GitLab are neck-and-neck and both pushing each other to innovate.

Here are some recently-announced GitHub features that GitLab had first:

* Rebase-and-merge button

* protected branches

* Trello-like view for issues

* Changing the base branch of a merge/pull request

Some features that GitLab has that GitHub does not:

* Geographically local caching instances for their on-premise product

* Prefixing a merge request name with WIP prevents merging

* Milestones at the group level

* A "Merge when CI Succeeds" button

* Built-in CI that is better-designed than Travis

Where GitLab will really be transformative is their long term vision to become a platform for the entire software development lifecycle. Their endgame is to be a platform where you can spin up a development environment and code in your browser via Koding integration, have your changes built and tested in GitLab CI, and then deployed via Kubernetes integration, with the environment for every stage of the pipeline customizable via a dockerfile in the repo. Whether or not you disagree with their vision, they have loftier goals than GitHub does.

Is it really worth that? You can host your projects on your own (way cheaper) VPS with ease, and there are numerous free tools to plot contribution graphs and whatever it is you get from Github/Gitlab...

This is exactly what I am talking about. A typical developer response who tries to optimize cents instead of their time. I don't care if things are cheaper (to a reasonable extent). I care about quality and getting things done.

My time and companies time is better spent working on our core product. Can I setup a VPS server with Gogs[1]? Of course, but that is wasted bandwidth and energy. Less than $2 a day for GitHub a tool that I use daily and religiously is great value.

Curious, have you tried running your own startup before?

[1] https://github.com/gogits/gogs

I was curious what you get from Github/Gitlab that you can't get from a simple git setup on a VPS, I was not trying to say you're wasting money or that my setup is better, there's no need to be aggressive. All I ever needed was `git init --bare` and giving out the credentials for the project members, which for me is quicker than setting things up on Github.

If the entry barrier for GitLab is setting up/maintaining your own instance, you can always opt for https://githost.io/

The most value in GitLab today is that you have many things that requires you to setup additional integration with GitHub, as part of the product, and because of that you can get complex workflows mapped easily.

Opting for or favoring self hosting for manageable installations may not simply be a cost optimization strategy at the expense of time.

For example, I personally opt for self hosting in many cases where I need more control over what runs on the server. It saves me a lot of time if I can do this; cost savings is a side benefit.

$50/month for an org? - definitely.

I live in Germany, and feel Gitlab website is quite slow :/ is it supposed to be as snappy as Github?

It is our ambition to make GitLab.com as fast as GitHub.com but currently we're slower. Please see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59 for more information on how we're working to improve this.

Wow, that's surprisingly candid.

Thanks for this, I'm slowly moving over to Gitlab anyways :) I just love how open it is

This depends a bit on what parts of GitLab(.com) you're using. For example, viewing issues should generally be as fast as GitHub.com (http://stats.pingdom.com/81vpf8jyr1h9/1902794/2016/10 vs http://stats.pingdom.com/81vpf8jyr1h9/1902795/2016/10). Other parts may be a bit slower; pushing for example can still be a bit slow at times.

I'm on the East Coast. For a while GitLab was quite slow. Much better now. They made a lot of progress in the past 3 or 4 releases. However, I agree that GitHub is still better in terms of performance. Now, I put things like tooling, pricing model, features, and ethic of the company above performance :)

Thanks for sticking with us Dudul. We want to make sure performance will also be a reason to pick us and are working on it in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&sta... and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues?scope=al...

Don't put your hopes up too much. GitLab does not even have half the community that GitHab has but their service is already a multiple times slower. From my experience if something already starts off really badly, then any attempts to retrospectively fix major issues in their core system rarely work out well. The more successful GitLab will be, the more their service will fall apart under its own weight. This is what happens when you aggressively undersell your service. GitLab are not magicians. Cheap remains cheap in the end.

If you're into self-hosting, you can check Gogs which is probably the most lightweight Github-like platform (but also the one with the least features)