It's different. GitLab is more of a one-stop-shop for source control, CI, operations concerns, etc. GitHub is more of a social network.

Both are good at what they do. I don't consider them to be direct competitors, except in that the general public thinks they are.

I agree.

GitHub = social, more ideal for open source projects.

GitLab = internal single solution for dev shops.

+1000

Thanks for asking. One of our big goals is to address the awareness-gap about the GitLab offering.

So instead of a version control system that lets people try out different integrations, GitLab provides an opinionated (yet flexible with key integrations and the option to opt out of anything you don't want) way to run the entire software development and deployment lifecycle. You can start with planning your issues, then you create the code (usually in your editor of choice but there's a web IDE that makes quick fixes much faster in GitLab), then you store your code with our version control. Using the GitLab CI you can set up automated jobs that include all kinds of tests (we provide the Auto DevOps pipeline for a set of best practices to automatically do tests and security scans and also provide Prometheus metrics without you having to do a thing). Then comes the CD part, followed by monitoring via Prometheus and tracing with Jaeger. You can deploy the code to k8s clusters directly on GitLab making k8s a lot more accessible to developers and then run it on any cloud. Our GKE integration is pretty dope. I personally am working on bringing similar serverless functionality to the product soon as well. This is by no means an exhaustive list but I covered the main aspects from my perspective. You can learn more here - https://about.gitlab.com/features/

I'm not that familiar with Github but the workflow for creating issues, trying branches to that issue, and tying pull requests to an issue was very good and really helped me get started with Gitlab. I also appreciated the build server which is very integrated into that workflow. I tried creating my own project on Github but couldn't really figure out how to tie a pull request or a branch to an issue. I'm sure it's possible but with Gitlab it was immediately obvious how to do it and almost hard to avoid it.

I spent a lot of time with Gitlab Auto DevOps but never really got it off the ground. I think I could make it work now but that Git + Gitlab + Docker + Kubernetes was just too much to learn in one go. It certainly didn't help that I started out with Amazon EKS instead of the recommended Google Cloud option.

In the future I would like see them add a hosted Maven repository (but I don't think that's in the stars) and if they are feeling adventurous I would like to see them explore visualizing the execution of multi-stage Dockerfiles as process pipelines the way they visualize .gitlab-ci.yml files today.

Perhaps these very subjective impressions from someone who doesn't have a lot of prior experience with either product will give you an idea of how these products differ. ;-)

Maven repository is coming in 11.3!

I personally couldn't really name one but it is many small incremental improvements adding up to something bigger.

When a place I used to work at mandated a switch away from GitHub to GitLab I was a bit annoyed and saw it as penny pinching, going for the cheaper but crappier option, but since using it daily for a while I am a convert. I have my own installs of the free version running in some places now as well, and I find that pretty painless.

Their CI tool is nice as well, dead easy to get started with.

I use it because they give larger repo size limit. I think it's 10G now. All my side projects are smaller games so I use that space.

Self-hostable, built in CI...

Agreed, for me this is a killer feature. Being able to just download the gitlab-runner executable (1 file) on mac/windows/linux and register a private runner - even on gitlab.com - and the simple configuration of CI builds, with the deep integration of CI results in the whole gitlab experience (commit browser, merge requests ("merge if CI succeeds", etc)) is best of class.

Edit: I'm not usually bothered by downvotes but I'm curious about what kind of agenda whoever downvoted this has.

Self hosting is a big one. Having control over your source code and a core component to development workflow is important to some people.