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.

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?

>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.

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.

>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.

Looking at the commits for GitLab CE, I can't really find a single recent contribution by someone not employed by GitLab. So I doubt it "gets fixed faster" than the enterprise version.

Actually there are many community contributions. E.g. for 9.5 it's 82 merged MRs from the community.

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests?scope...

> 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/