| 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 |
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.