[sgb_QQ]

It's worth pointing out that Gitlab's hosted service has suffered a myriad of pretty disastrous outages and problems over the past 12 months. In my experience, it's been totally unreliable compared to it's rivals. So I wouldn't say that they are a leading example of success just yet, although they certainly have a good shot.

[jchw]

Well, historically speaking and also likely true today, GitLab has made most of its customers by virtue of being the 'enterprise' solution. It existed before GitHub Enterprise, and was a good way to have Git hosting behind the firewall.

GitLab's hosted service, on the other hand, has traditionally been free and best-effort. That and they're moving hosting providers, which is definitely a non-trivial migration.

It's definitely fair to complain if you paid for the hosted version, but I think GitLab was plenty successful without monetizing GitLab.com.

[richardwhiuk]

The paid for hosted version is AFAICT difficult to run reliably as well - especially the CI runners.

GitLab prioritize breadth over depth - i.e. new features over bug fixes.

As far as I can tell, their regression testing is sub-optimal. Expanding a diff on a code review was broken in two releases.

[jchw]

I administrated an instance of GitLab EE for around a year solo for my previous employer. It was absolutely painless. The biggest issue I recall hitting was when I upgraded my LetsEncrypt setup broke, because they added LetsEncrypt setup to the core. The bug that caused it was fixed a couple days later anyways, though.

We used GitLab CI very heavily. The only issue we hit was disk space on workers filling up - but it was easy to resolve this by making a Cron job run `docker system prune`.

Generally, the GitLab team definitely has moved very quickly on new features and that has caused things to break here and there. I also agree they could use better regression testing. Still, they are very responsive to issue reports and most of the time issues that I care about are resolved very quickly.

GitHub as a competitor obviously is a lot more stable. But, I was definitely willing to trade some stability for the features GitLab offered, and I do feel they have been steadily improving in the past year.

[segmondy]

Github had a major outage. Google has been having outages for the last week. Facebook had an outage yesterday. AWS is always having some sort of outage. Outages are actually more common than we think.

[umvi]

I would guess most companies prefer to self-host GitLab internally. That's what mine does and we've never had any problems with it.