I don't use it much, or rather at all so I don't have much to say. GitLab has a more appealing UI than BitBucket (likely more features too), they have a great team who hang out here on HN and respond to feedback very quickly, they are actually focused on just GitLab while Atlassian has a lot of projects to work on, and their rate of development is much faster.
Atlassian is indeed broader then just BitBucket and a better comparison. GitLab does a broader offering than Atlassian by including things like packaging, monitoring, and security. And GitLab is a single application instead of a suite of tools with different data models.
I used Bitbucket for a long time before Gitlab (mostly because they had hg support when I needed it), and IMO, Gitlab is honestly a better product, UI-wise. At the end of they day, they all get the job, done, though.
If you're only comparing Bitbucket by itself to Gitlab then you'd be correct.
If you do a fair comparison and compare the entire Atlassian suite to Gitlab, then you see that the Atlassian suite is far more powerful for most enterprise use cases, which typically involve highly customized workflows and reporting in Jira. The integrations with Jira, making it incredibly easy for higher ups to follow overall progress on software projects that are tied to complicated business processes with long lifecycles, to help understand where the enterprise is in its lifecycle on any given issue and reprioritize resources to prioritized tasks as needed.
Nobody has an issue tracker that really competes with Jira in this space, least of all Gitlab.
That's funny, because you're right, and Atlassian has an enormous head start. And it's hard to explain why I like GitLab so much more.
I used the entire Atlassian suite for 3 years at my first web development gig, when I started over 7 years ago. I just have all these memories of things being ugly, slow, and hard to customize. Although I had a mostly positive experience with Confluence. Bamboo was just not nice to use. BitBucket does most of the same things, but it just didn't feel nice to use. Maybe it's the UI, or the dark blue theme. Maybe it's purely psychological, like GitHub was the place where all the cool developers hang out, and BitBucket is the corporate nerd who just wants to fit in so they give away all their private repos for free. So I dumped my private, personal stuff on BitBucket, until GitLab came along.
And honestly, up until the last few months, I actually really disliked GitLab. I kind of saw them as just rip-offs who were blatantly copying GitHub, and stealing their customers. But then I realized that GitHub hasn't really done anything interesting for years and years, while GitLab is working on all these awesome features and integrating things that GitHub should have been doing years ago. So now my opinion is that GitHub had their chance, and they blew. GitLab is the new cool place to host your code.
We use JIRA so by default we are shoe-horned into Stash/Bitbucket. I've used gitlab on my own and found it beyond easy to use and very reliable. I see gitlab people posting every once and a while on hacker news and they seem very interested in improving the product overall. Contrasted with Atlassian who seems to have no interest in improving their core product and only enabling new revenue-driving products or costly extensions. So thanks.
I have used both bitbucket and, recently, gitlab for personal projects and projects for small companies. I can't say much for x-feature or another, but gitlab just feels "easier".
I think the GitLab interface is pretty good, especially compared to GitHubs. I can't speak for BitBucket since I've only used it once, but I do remember having a hard time finding my way around it.
Our org started using BitBucket cloud for a major project. The developer experience is light years behind Gitlab and Github.
We are moving our entire pipeline to Gitlab instead. The difference in productivity and experience using Gitlab is shocking compared to Bitbucket.
Their React app, while cool, is painfully slow, PR reviews are very clunky and there is no code highlighting on diffs.
I recently switched from Github to Gitlab (although only for private projects). In the past I'd used Bitbucket but I disliked the interface. Gitlab, on the other hand, is much better. I think overall I still prefer Github, but it's nice to have unlimited private repos and Gitlab is approaching being as good. It's a remarkably polished project.
As a data point, our company that only uses git moved from GitLab to BitBucket literally about two months ago. No idea why (waaaay to low on the food chain) but I'm guessing it must have some advantages at least.
Thanks for mentioning us. In my opinion the primary difference between Atlassian and GitLab is that they have separate applications that integrate while we have a single application https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#single-application
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