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.
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.
I'm not sure why Atlassian would acquire Gitlab when they already have Stash (which might be called Bitbucket Server now - but either way is a fully fledged Git{la,hu}b competitor)
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.
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
We're currently moving to the Atlassian stack, from Bitbucket to Jira to Confluence. I really want to switch over to Gitlab reading this but the sunk cost is too huge already...
If anyone is concerned about migrating to Gitlab for that reason, well, I believe Atlassian is fully bootstrapped and profitable. I personally use Gitlab for my private projects but just thought I'd mention.
Everyone is comparing GitHub with GitLab in the comments, but they are ignoring the other competitor.
I think Atlassian is the company that makes the most out of the git marketplace, even if they have fewer customers. They are simply more efficient, and are ready to take over with Bitbucket if GitHub fails.
Also, many companies pay for Jira+Confluence even if they use GitHub.
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.
GitLab has probably 5x as many features as Bitbucket. For example you still need a ticketing system with Bitbucket (Jira), but not with Gitlab since its issues system is self contained.
I feel like Gitlab will try to pull an Atlassian in the future. They already said they are changing focus to their cloud-based offering over the on-prem version.
It has the great advantage of being a company you can pay to fix problems. I don't know who you can pay to implement some custom git system for handling huge files and repos. GitHub/Atlassian/GitLab are not interested in working on your company specific workflow.
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.
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.
When was GitLab ahead of GitHub? I've been using both for as long as I remember, I always thought GitLab is more marketing than GitHub. Believe or not, I prefer BitBucket because I don't care much for CI integrations.
What made you pick Gitlab over Bitbucket? Both can be self-hosted, but I'm not sure yet which one to choose myself. We do use Jira/Confluence internally so we might want to stick within that ecosystem but I hear very good things about Gitlab. I believe both integrate well with Jira as well and support smartcommits. What were the advantages for you?
I guess that "might even be running Bitbucket at a loss" makes it hard to compete with Bitbucket on price. And Bitbucket is a good product and Atlassian is a great company. I don't think GitLab should be compared with Confluence.
Maybe I'll switch GitLab to a simple plan based pricing model and compete on its strengths:
1) Advanced permissions
2) Can run your own server for free if you ever need to
3) CI server integration with GitLab CI (coming soon)
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