Agreed, Github does not make sense for small consulting companies. We have hundreds of repositories (way more than the Github top plan) and only 10 employees. We have been hosting our own git server (previously Gitorious and now Gitlab) and haven't looked back. Way more economic than Github enterprise. I guess these days Bitbucket or hosted Gitlab would also be a reasonable alternative.
Timely for me.
At my workplace, we are migrating to git and the devs would like to use github, but management is expressing reluctance to either rely on an external host or fork out for github enterprise, despite our arguments.
I was already planning on installing gitlab this week to try it out.
Anyone here got any advice or suggestions on using it as a Github replacement for a small team?
At where I work we use Github Enterprise, which costs way more than Gitlab Enterprise, is not scalable, and barely cares about enterprise customers like ourselves. Gitlab on the other hand is much cheaper, is highly scalable, runs in AWS, and is responsive to requests. Ultimately to make it as a business you need to provide what the customer wants and is willing to pay. Github never did.
Our company gives them money but the main thing is that we have a lot of small private projects that are more like prototypes and will never see the light of day. We are not permitted to open source them and probably wouldn't if we could because they'd be worthless to everyone but us. The pricing plans for additional private repos is pretty steep with github so we had to pay for a crappy repository hosting service to dump all of our second tier projects. GitLab would be pretty neat to allow us to store our second rate stuff on our own servers and the stuff we use every day on github.
Seconded with the strongest possible level of agreement. Though it seems github has an on-prem product for enterprises, how much value could they provide on top of a cheaper (or free) option of gitlab and such?
The nearly 4B market cap public company I work at uses gitlab to host our internal repositories. It works really well for us, we get a lot of the benefits of github, but we have control.
GitHub is great for open source projects, but it sucks for private repositories:
* No private repo in the free plan
* Pricing per repo in the paid plan - probably fine for a startup with just a couple products, unusable for a service company that starts a new project every month
So if you care about private repos, BitBucket vs GitLab is interesting.
I don't think it's necessarily just "personal use". The complexity quickly scales with the company size. Replacing Github with Gitlab might be a week-long project at a small company but could easily turn into a multi-year project at a large one.
It's not just a technical problem, either. Bigger companies tend to have more expertise-oriented teams (security, compliance, developer tooling, operations, internal infrastructure) which tends to make decisions more difficult than when a single person or team can do it themselves.
i think the killer feature of gitlab is still self-hosted instances. it makes it really hard to justify using github enterprise. as far as gitlab.com, i've toyed around with it on personal projects and it still has a very long way to go in terms of reliability and speed.
You could look at Gitea. I switched from GitLab and find it’s a better fit for me. GitLab is probably better for large teams, but it’s bloated and overpriced for small developers IMO.
For the record, I think GitLab is awesome :) There's a ton of amazing reasons for large companies to use GitLab (storing your own data, customization, etc) that I completely stand by.
My umbrage is simply with the price argument Gogs lead with; it'll always end up cheaper to use GitHub (or another hosted solution) than to run your own.
Gitlab is the _only_ choice when your company prefers on-prem (which is the overwhelming majority of >10k employee companies) -- I work at a company with more than 15k employees and we hold an enterprise (plus) license for 8k seats.
We are definitely not alone, companies like EA/IBM/Goldman Sachs have _large_ internal deployments of gitlab.
They certainly have developer mindshare in large companies, but github is the facebook of sourcecode repositories, it will always be more popular outside (or in smaller, less self-hosty orgs).
Well, your salary is something of a sunk cost. Now depending on the amount of time spent managing that GitLab server, it might make financial sense. If it is truly easy to maintain as they seek, and claim, then it just might make sense.
Consider the organization that needs hosted GitHub enterprise - a pricey proposition. Unless you could otherwise have spent your time working on a feature that would directly increase sales (which is probably unlikely in an enterprise locale) then your time really is just sunk cost.
So to recap, for the one-off private repo - probably easier and more sensible in terms of resources to use GitHub. For a large organization that has man hours to burn or otherwise needs an in-house hosted solution, GitLab (or Gogs) could make sense.
I find it quite hard to comprehend why people use Github for private repositories. There are many free alternatives. BitBucket seems to be the famous one, but Gitlab has grown into an amazing product with 3 different offerings; On premise community edition, on premise enterprise and hosted (like Github).
We have used the on premise community edition for about 3 years now. I first installed it when you had to run about a billion commands manually and it was great even then. Now you can install it with an apt-get and a few lines.
Lets not forget about the obvious negatives of Github (ignoring pricing).
1) Its hosted which means it can go down
2) It is closed source
3) Feature based is quite small (compared to Gitlab)
Gitlab is a regular release cycle, once a month which always comes with new features.
Bitbucket's private repos for team upto 5 members used to be really great. But GitHug/Gitlab also offers the same.
Advantages of GitHub
1. Better and faster UI in my opinion
Advantages of GitLab
1. Awesome CD/CI Integration with unlimited minutes in self hosted runners. It is just brilliant
2. Good integration between issues, branches and merge request
3. Simple time tracking and estimate for issues.
4. Better git history graphs than GitHub.
5. Truly free for any team size. you pay for the enterprise-y features only as required. The basic stuff is totally free
The company I work for has a bunch of non-programmers using and working in gitlab (or "the git"), I can't really see it happening with GitHub regardless of where it was hosted.
Gitlab just seems better for actually running a software project.
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