[harabat]

Would you be able to list some of the negative developments you expect from GitLab going forward? For example, I know they are reducing support for Free Tier on their managed instance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30791162). Is that the kind of thing you're talking about?

What would you recommend instead? Gitea?

[afandian]

I should say that I respect and admire GitLab's pursuit of financial sustainability and not selling themselves too cheap. But the resulting culture, combined with the actual product experience, is offputting.

The issue tracking and labelling system is fine for what it is, but not good enough for planning projects. The Epics and Milestones functionality appears thrown together and isn't useful for much (we tried). Missing features such as persistent links to milestones (links are essentially a text string), lack of workflows ("You can do anything! Just ... use labels"), Milestones lack a change history, lack of nested Epics.

We want to be able to use confidential issues every now and again, which mean that everyone in the org needs a seat license to contribute or even view. If you want nested Epics you have to jump from $240 /seat/year to $1200 /seat/year for every single seat (hence the above linked issue).

Fundamentally they are trying to be the "everything" platform, and their sales material suggets that you can drop subscriptions to all kinds of competitors. Our experience was that the features weren't quite good enough.

I don't necessarily expect things to get worse. I just find that the tools aren't quite good enough to justify the sales talk, and seeing them expand the breadth of feature set without improving core stuff is disappointing.

We're staying with GitLab for code and dev team, because we're already there and we've built CI pipelines etc. But moving to Jira for issue tracking and planning, and so far it's much nicer.

EDIT: Just noticed that they closed the issue [0] with a glib "opportunities to help customers derive more value from GitLab".

[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185

[nicoburns]

> But moving to Jira for issue tracking and planning, and so far it's much nicer.

Wow, Jira being better is really damning. FWIW, there's a lot of competitors to Jira these days, and most of them are much better. We're using Shortcut, and it's been excellent.

[afandian]

Yeah we went into it with eyes open. I know "everyone hates Jira".

We did evaluate Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) and I did talk to a sales engineer.

We weren't able to make our issues open to the public, which was a serious blocker.

It wasn't clear how we would differentiate between user stories, bug tracking, epics, planned work, etc. And how to handle and track support and operational issues.

The response in the org (we're not all devs) has been almost universally positive, and very favourable compared to our GitLab issue-tracking experience.