As a user who really liked GitLab, there are a few things that made me consider to move back to GitHub:
1. They had a generous organization free tier, which was handy for stealthily moving companies to it (move a few repos, get people used to it, then move more repos, then when everyone recognizes the value, start paying). They ruined that as soon as they put a limit on the number of people that can be in an org for free. Moving stealthily was good because...
2. GitLab CI was best-of-breed, but GitHub Actions is really good too now (maybe better? I haven't used it enough to answer that).
3. The price is really high now, so it doesn't really make sense to even move a company over to it.
4. The community is (and has always been) on GitHub, so there was always a big reason to be there. Now that the rest of the GitLab offerings aren't as competitive, this wins.
P.S. I just wish GitLab were more like GitHub. GitLab has always been more clumsy; don't differentiate on what's good about GitHub, GitLab has so much to offer.
GitHub got a lot of fire in their ... after acquisition. I was stunned how fast GitLab overtook GitHub feature-wise, but looks like now they're at least trying to compete.
Is the issue tracker in GitLab a lot better than GitHub? I always was under the impression that they had simply been trying to copy GitHub, but I find most of GitHub's features toy-level unusable :(.
What’s not to like? Moving to GitLab. I actually like Github. It works and works well. Change for change sake is a bad motivation for such a critical part of software development.
If MS “ruins” Github, then I could move then right? Because it’s so easy? Right now, Github isn’t ruined, so what is so compelling about moving now? I am failing to see the emergency. What happens if GitLab is bought by someone else we don’t like? Do we move again? It’s tiring to keep up with all of the things about which we should be outraged. I just want a rock solid product that works. GitHub does that, so what is so compelling about moving to GitLab?
I've been comparing Github and Gitlab over the last few weeks. Gitlab had a few more features in the web interface, which is why we chose it for a current project. Github has added these features last week, mostly thanks to pressure, which is good. Here's where Gitlab is lacking though: It's quite buggy, its API is nowhere near as good as Github's and there is no way to secure webhooks, which IMO is quite a big deal. If I'd decide today for another project I'd just pay Github 7$ a month and be done with it. In fact if we keep having issues that's exactly what we'll do - migrating in a git world is quite easy for the points mentioned in the article.
I've been quite impressed how Github has acted over the last weeks - when there's actually an outcry they're quite nimble and can react quickly. They've noticed the competition catching up and shot themselves ahead of the curve again.
Funnily enough a friend of mine and I migrated some of our projects over to GitLab right before this original story broke. It’s really unfortunate though that this will probably go through since GitHub was/is really the staple site for social programming and project management, something that GitLab is certainly lacking.
I get why GitLab wrote this, but it seems like just a stab at GitHub.
There seems to be a lot of hating on GitHub here, but I personally love GitHub (and we use GitLab at my current employer).
I think GitLab is doing a great thing, and I appreciate that their community edition is free and open source, but GitHub has been able to provide an invaluable service. They have a great community that facilitates open source projects and a vastly better UI than GitLab (though that isn't saying much with how awful GitLab's UI is).
I'm eager to see how GitHub evolves in the future with GitLab as a competitor, as GitLab has a lot of nice features (built-in CI, etc).
IMO, the Gitlab interface is better than github for most of the actual code features. Github still doesn't have a graphical tree view of the commit history. Hell, even the git CLI has that.
The only thing I like better about Github is the dashboard for managing MR's/issues/notifications. Gitlab still hasn't managed to figure that out. Gitlab CI was also miles ahead of Github CI for a long time. Github is better now, but CI is one of the few things that really locks you into a vendor. Plus, Gitlab had much better enterprise pricing options for a long time. I'm not sure what it's like now. I don't have any numbers, but I suspect that Gitlab has more market share when it comes to locally hosted deployments.
Anecdotally I've found Github much cleaner-looking, much faster and more usable than Gitlab. Github was never opensource, and I think people used it for all of the above. I'd be surprised if the recent acquisition changes that.
The marketing department of Gitlab seems especially active on HN lately. Why is this article being revived? This was already talked about two years ago.
You know what is also open source? Git. I am not sure what the value is for having an open source clone of Github. Repositories can be changed in seconds thanks to git. So unless people are actually afraid of Microsoft reading private repos and can’t afford Github Enterprise, than I fail to understand why it matters that Gitlab is “open core.” Site reliability is far more important. I have never cared to look at Github source code. What for? It’s a utility for me like Dropbox or iCloud. GitHub and Github Enterprise have always worked great for me; as long as that continues to happen, why would someone like me care about Gitlab? Can anyone provide a specific benefit of Gitlab over Github? At the end of the day, what’s the value proposition?
For quite a while github looked like a cheap gitlab knock off rather than the other way around due to gitlab actually innovating and adding new features and github stagnating.
Now that github is adding the features that gitlab already added, they are more neck and neck again.
As a person who recently discovered gitlab and has been trying to push it (make it popular at work, and possibly use it to replace github, and encourage people to use it), this is amazing.
Installing Gitlab was definitely one of the painpoints, having an executable that just works is amazing
What are people's thoughts on open software projects like this eating into github licensing money? I feel guilty sometimes pushing gitlab since I really like github as a company (and want them to thrive)
I started a new project recently, and put it on Gitlab instead of GitHub. I'm very pleased so far, and have been finding reasons to justify encouraging others to move projects there as well.
I moved from Github to Gitlab years ago due to ethical issues (open source vs closed).
I think that, at the very least, it's beneficial to prop up competitors to Github to prevent them from achieving a monopoly. Too many people currently see Github and git as interchangeable and that is potentially disastrous considering Microsoft owns Github.
Instead of Gitlab actually attracting more customers, they're trying to extract more money from their existing customers. This never ever goes well. Why can CEOs not see this.
I'm moving to GitHub.
I've always championed the small guy, but the last couple of years have been terrible for Gitlab users.
I don't really see the point. GitHub has only improved since they were acquired.
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