[dj-wonk]

Why do people say "X and Y aren't comparable" and then proceed to compare them? :)

I'm not (only) trying to be pedantic here -- I'm just pointing out the loaded language. In both business models and product recommendations, people use the word "comparable" to justify their conclusions, rather than to explain their comparisons themselves.

It is all about framing a decision for a particular use case at a particular price point.

I guess you could say I'm the kind of person that can't help but notice that modern communication seems to be fraught with this pattern: let's state our conclusions without much justification and then choose our language minimize the "rationality" of alternatives. I think we can do better, as a community.

[kbenson]

Part of it is due to an alternate definition of comparable, which is "of equivalent quality; worthy of comparison", as opposed to "able to be likened to another; similar". It's being used as shorthand for "they aren't equivalent", and then they go to justify that assessment.

I get your point though. The form and structure of the language used, consciously of subconsciously, often conveys quite a bit more information than the words themselves impart. Sometimes this is meant to communicate or subconsciously sway the reader, sometimes it's leakage of the writer's mental state.

[azurelogic]

Exactly. With this definition, the phrase "compare and contrast" makes much more sense. The point here was to leap frog the fact that GitHub and GitLab have very comparable feature sets, and instead highlight the things that GitLab has that GitHub is totally missing.