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)
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'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...
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.
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.
For all of my personal projects I use GitLab. It has about the same amount of features as GitHub (more in many areas, in fact) and it's free for most usage, even private.
GitLab and BitBucket are going to eat GitHub's lunch if they don't change this crazy pricing model.
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.
Gitlab can replace nearly all of it, and it’s open source.
Bitbucket is absolutely terrible.
Jira is over-complicated and a server administration nightmare.
I probably like Confluence the most, ironically I didn’t like it until we switched to the cloud version and actually started getting new features and fixes (since nobody has time to actually maintain and upgrade it on-premise).
I'm curious as to why you didn't simply go with the free hosted gitlab.com option, instead of bitbucket. Both are hosted, and I feel that gitlab has more features (ci, free, and a few small niceties).
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 really like how GitLab is shaping up. I hope they start getting a bit more mind share from GitHub, but I think they really shot themselves in the foot with that recent pricing change. [1]
Having to pay the same amount per license, for folks that just want to create/edit or even just view issues, as a full blown developer is simply not tractable. There's a lot of value in the platform and all else equal I'd probably pick GitLab if I had to choose between GitLab, GitHub, BitBucket, JetBrains Space, or Shudder Azure DevOps.
But the price. Damn, it's just impossible to make that argument to yourself, never mind your CTO.
It's good to see this new pricing model. It's pretty obvious, a lot of the really hard problems that Enterprise would want solved, are being developed by commercially driven ventures. And by going this route, GitLab makes themselves WAY more attractive for these 3rd party vendors, to want to develop for GitLab.
Atlassian, with their Marketplace (https://marketplace.atlassian.com/), clearly spelt out how they could make you (3rd party vendor) money, if you developed for Bitbucket. GitLab, until this recent price change, never had one.
Plus this makes sense. GitLab's greatest value, is its foot in the door for Enterprise, and this is good first step to leveraging it.
Atlassian has the same pricing structure all users have to pay for all installed plugins.
If gitlab could figure out a way to be more granular without customers having to go through hoops of talking to sales team, gitlab would probably benefit greatly by converting more sale opportunities.
I can see many teams, rather than grabbing a hand-full of EE licenses would just stick with CE or maybe even just slap/integrate something on top to get what they want.
I agree that bitbucket aka shitbucket like all Atlassian products is a POS, but GitLab is far from unstable? We moved to GitLab (self hosted) and it’s been nothing but incredibly reliable for our 120~ people organisation and we use it heavily for mission critical code control, CI/CD and internal Wikis, if it was even slightly unstable - there’s no way we’d still be using it let alone raving about it.
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.
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 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)
What do you think?
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