Ask HN: GitHub vs. GitLab paid plans (2017)
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.
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.
That might be bogus logic, I don't know -- it's more of a gut feeling.
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests?scope...
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/
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/