[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.