Gitlab is a bit of a mess though:

a) Gitlab.com is ridiculously slow. Even the CEO admits they failed to invest in it.

b) You can't disable features you don't need so you end up with a sidebar full of Kubernetes and Security features for a Git project dedicated to documentation.

c) Staggering amount of open issues and merge requests so you feel discouraged from even raising anything since it just gets lost in the weeds.

d) On the main Git project screen there are 15 buttons. Including again ones for "Add Kubernetes cluster" or "Add License" which you can't remove or hide even though it's irrelevant for 99% of Git projects.

e) Feature set and billing are all over the place. It has great project/issue management but in order to get say roadmaps you need to have everyone in your team on the $99/month plan. Even though they aren't developers. So in some cases Gitlab ends up being much more expensive than Jira + Github.

I could keep going. But Gitlab is an example of a company that is moving too fast and needs much better product management. I would take Github's more deliberate approach any day.

Thank you for your feedback!

Regarding performance, we've made some recent improvements (here's one example: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/30507#note_293...), but we know we need to do more. We're actively working to improve our sitespeed (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/issues/7154), and we have several other improvements in process this quarter.

Regarding disabling features and the Git project screen, our UX research team has heard this feedback from other users. It's fair feedback, and we're looking at how to address it.

I love GitLab's transparency and the decentralized concept; But I can't comprehend how some basic features take as long as they do to get done. It took GitLab _3 YEARS_ to add a "What's new" link to the header: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/16653 ... and it still isn't closed.

Issues fall through the cracks because there's no internal health oversight, take this issue for example: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/21907 It simply ceased to exist because the original staff member left GitLab.

I've also seen community MRs with weeks of work go to waste because GL staff couldn't take proper ownership/responsibility to see them through.

I think having a "all hands" week where all work stops except for going through current GitLab.org issues, fixing labeling/priorities, adding related issues and pinging the correct leads would do WONDERS.

Sadly, if GitHub adds scoped labels and descriptions we'll be making a move over as it's the final piece of the puzzle.

My favorite is when I open an issue and get no response.

Then, after a year, a bot auto-closes the issue due to "inactivity"...

One feature that would help a ton, that would hopefully be low hanging is to refresh the "Issues", "Merge Requests", and "To Do" count indicators in the background.

They're basically useless right now because I constantly have 6+ tabs open and they all have different numbers and I just now I need to do a full page refresh to get the updated number.

I agree that there are loads of open Gitlab issues, but I’ve found that their team are really easy to communicate with, really open to feedback and somehow also respond really quickly on issues. I like that they use Gitlab for so much and that they’re still really open to hearing about a workflow that’s different to theirs and keen to help with that.

As a user I really like that they have their tickets open like that. I’d never contact Github and tell them about some minor feature that would be helpful or give them feedback on a new feature they’ve released because how would you even do that in a way that’s not annoying? And with Gitlab you often get to feed in at the design stage which you’re completely shut out from anywhere else.

I’m not sure if you’ve actually had issues go missing - I know they have loads of repos and I’ve only engaged with a few - but my experience definitely hasn’t been that things get lost in the weeds.

For what it’s worth I agree with all the extra features being too visible. I kinda get it - one day I’ll get round to learning Kubernetes and I’ll probably do something with Gitlab’s integration when I do - but while I don’t use them those features are definitely too visible and add too much clutter.

We host our own GitLab instance and it's been great. Performance is way better than the public GitLab site and it's been dependable. It would be nice to disable some of the features but, overall, everyone at my company is happy.

Ah yes, the "Who can find the open 2y old GitLab issue for our problem" game. There is always one and it always has a couple of "This is an issue for a customer <zendesk link>" comments. At least even very old issues still get responses and seemingly are tracked somehow.

I kind of agree with the "too fast". It seems to me that many features are being created as a PoC to pad out features lists and having something new to market. It will then live on as barely useable and accumulates hundreds/thousands of issues as the devs seem to be spread way too thin over all the PoC, core and new features.

This is great feedback. Going fast is a core part of our strategy, as is focusing on breadth over depth (https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/#breadth-over-dept...). Not only does this provide an easier path to collaborate and contribute for the wider community, it allows us to shorten the feedback loop with everyone that uses GitLab so that we can invest our time and effort in the areas that matter most to the wider community.

That said, I completely agree that we need to get better how we iterate and improve the quality and performance of existing features. We've more than doubled the number of Product Managers, Engineers, and UX Designers over the last 12 months to work alongside the wider community to help transition "barely usable" features into lovable features. Please ping me (@gweaver) on any long standing issues that are important to you and i'll do my best to route it to the directly responsible PM.

> But Gitlab is an example of a company that is moving too fast

I've studied GitLab's code history for a while, and they have been moving at a very fast pace for years now. Below is a one year window (from today) into to their gitlab repo.

https://imgur.com/HOh5Zrr

https://imgur.com/snU8UfY

https://imgur.com/DDxD3lN

Some points of interest are:

1) 15k commits are merge commits.

2) The vast majority of the code churn is ruby, which is expected.

3) Based on the bus factor, a lot of files that are iterated on, have less than 10 unique contributors. And there are a handful of files that are iterated on a lot, by a lot of people.

4) A lot of the code changes are 10 lines of churn (lines added, changed, deleted) or less, which indicates incremental improvements/bug fixes/etc., as opposed to adding new functionality.

Something that I'm not doing right now, is mapping the churn, to the number of unique contributors. It would be interesting to see if there is a pattern to their churn vs number of contributors.

GitLab is definitely moving at a very fast pace, and it would be interesting to map this to their issues, but their API is extremely slow, so I've never bothered trying.

Edit: For the scatter charts, the x-axis represents the number of files. And the y-axis is number of contributors (bus factor chart) and churn size (churn chart)

The GitLab license is really tough. We use GitLab internally with about 1000 users, but only 50-100 are developers. The rest are analysts and data scientists who either edit doc files or push their R projects so other people can see them.

25 of those are willing to pay for the advanced features at $100/month, but the entire instance has to be upgraded. It’s frustrating because there’s no way to pay $100/month so 950 people can view a private repo or edit markdown.

If we could enable features for just the devs who need it, we could. The GitLab folks were nice, but the only workaround for this was to have multiple instances that people would connect to depending on their need. That’s confusing for non-devs and also many projects have a few developers but 3x as many people who just edit markdown or view CI status.

I'm a solo developer and I disagree with everything you have said. Gitlab has been an absolute joy to use. Sure, it has a lot of features, but it's not like you are forced to use stuff you don't need. My workflow is pretty simple, yet I have never felt like I'm using a sledgehammer to kill a fly.

I don’t remember gitlab being this cluttered, these new features you mention must be relatively new.

Haven’t used them since they allowed an intern to purge the production database.

Kind of glad I have stuck with github thus far.

Intern? I don't remember that detail being shared.

Really!?!?

It wasn't an intern, it was (or rather is now) a senior engineer, and this was 2 years ago now.

GH is clearly not innovating nearly as much as GitLab and hasn’t been for a long time, but since they have so a huge chunk of the market already they can see what works and what doesn’t work for GitLab and cherry pick what they like. Apple operates in a very similar manner - in many areas they lag behind.

I'm not sure this is correct. GH seems to take their time, and get things right. They're product leadership is really top tier compared to the rest of the tools providers who are often quick to release a feature half-baked hoping to iterate. I've rarely seen a GH feature that's not fully polished and "makes sense" on day 1.

They are the Apple of the dev tools space. Less is nearly always more.

Can't really agree on that, looking at Github Actions for example.

It's such a lack luster offering with severe limitations that make it almost unusable for any sort of serious project (no support for private Docker repository, no manual steps, yaml support is abyssmal, ...)

My view is that GitLab is more prone to feature creep. They have a lot of innovative features, but because of the number of features, most of them really only feel 90% or 95% of the way there. GitHub chooses a smaller number of features, but they feel more polished.

I don't think the feature creep is all bad. Sometimes the new features are amazingly useful, if not totally polished. It depends on what you need, and sometimes you need features that only GitLab has.

VS Code online is a substantially more robust offering than the GitLab Web IDE. Not an apples to apples comparison of the actual substance of the offerings here.

This isn't really a useful observation — it's not like any of those were something unique which nobody had thought of before GitLab implemented them, either. It'd be far more useful to compare them knowledgeably and talk about their respective benefits and drawbacks.

This is a "Good Thing" for everyone involved.

Look at Android vs iOS. Each release sees popular features "borrowed" from the competition. Back and forth Google takes something Apple did well, then Apple turns around and does the same.

Tight competition between two platforms gives us, the consumers/users, the best. It drives innovation, it drives down prices (I mean, lets be honest, GitLab had the entire "free" thing down a LONG time ago), and the features that we do have get refined to be even better.

BTW I've seen the same thing on Zoho side, they have so many products and they all work seamlessly across one another, yet they have a very little market share.

The bigger question is, how far will "but we did it first!" carry a business? After all, Github wins that battle on the core feature set.

How do the implementations compare?

In this case, they don't. Codespaces offers a lot more functionality than the GitLab web IDE.

Competition is good for customers. I don't care who had the feature first.

I'm sure he'll have his usual blogpost moaning about how Gitlab already has it by end of day.

Why wait until the end of the day on the west coast? :) We just posted https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/05/06/git-challenge/ where we encourage you to compare:

1. GitHub Insights with GitLab Insights, Contribution Analytics, Issues Analytics, Productivity Analytics, Value Stream Analytics, DevOps Score, Code Review Analytics, and CI/CD Analytics.

2. GitHub security features with GitLab Container Scanning, Dependency List, Dependency Scanning, Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), Security Dashboard, Static Application Security Testing (SAST), and Secrets Detection.

3. GitHub Codespaces with the GitLab Web IDE, CI/CD Environments, Review apps, and Live Preview.

I'd definitely encourage everyone to git GL a try - our teams switched over from GH + Jira about a year ago, and haven't looked back. The integrated CI and project management features are a game changer.

I have to agree. I have been a big champion of GH but the more I use GL the more I keep asking myself why I don't just do all my stuff in GL.

Git it a try, pun intended? :-D

'Twas a simple typo, but I'll happily retcon it into a pun!

GitLab is also faster at cloning than GitHub. Whenever I have to clone a bunch of website repos to update templates for my website generator the GitLab repos finish cloning first even though I start them last.

To be fair, nothing was announced today by GH that wasn't in GL for several years.

Perhaps the quality of VS Code trumps GL WebIDE ... But I am not the sort of developer to ditch my desktop editors / IDEs for something running in a browser (electron or otherwise).

I think the most important thing that most people maybe forgetting is, GitHub maybe announcing these features, but these features were the results of acquiring companies that were solely focused on these features for years.

So if you take this into consideration, GitHub's feature has not only been in works for a while, but they have been refined to a point that GitLab will have a hard time catching up to.

There is no way GitLab will be able to compete on the IDE front-end for a while since GitHub's solution is essentially VSCode which they own and is iterated on at an incredible rate. And the one thing Microsoft hasn't made open source, that makes remote work incredibility powerful, is what makes Codespace incredibility difficult for GitLab to compete with.

Their security scan feature is the result of acquiring a leader in the field with expertise that GitLab will have a hard time matching/hiring for. And GitHub's Insights feature is the result of multiple acquisitions with years of previous experience.

These announcements maybe new, but the solutions that GitHub has released are years ahead of GitLab's existing solution.

I think that you are wrong on VS Code Remote not being open source. Here is the relevant repository: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-release. Corresponding official documentation (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview) states that Visual Studio Codespaces is essentially a managed service of Visual Studio Code Remote Development. BTW, there is also an interesting alternative, the `code-server` project (https://github.com/cdr/code-server).

P.S. FYI: The TLS certificate on https://gitsense.com has expired.

That repo doesn’t have any code in it, it’s used purely for issue tracking and syncing with the VS extension repo, I believe.

My bad. Apparently, you're correct. It seems that relevant code is a part of VS Code codebase. Perhaps, this is it (though, I very well might be wrong on this, too): https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/tree/master/src/vs/workb....

I vaguely remember a post a while back (maybe a year ago) where they said they can't make a part of their remote technology open-source. Maybe things have changed, but I was quite sure it was something they were keeping close to them.

Also thanks for pointing out the certificate issue. I was actually leaving it that way on purpose, but I guess it can reflect poorly on my product, so I should just update the landing page with something non-descriptive.

Perhaps, you're right (or maybe not :-). Frankly, all this stuff, while interesting and eventually useful, is a bit low on my current priority list ... Re: certificate - You're welcome.

Yeah, well good luck with that one.

With this feature, MS just ventured in a space where no-one can compare yet.

If this ever gets popular, that's check mate right here.

Was this reply to the wrong comment? Cause your first line is a total non sequitur to what you're replying to. And this is definitely a space people both a) can compare (compete?) and b) MS is playing catchup to (albeit with a great advantage).