What happened to Gitlab? They used to be one step ahead of Github in some areas, then seemed to go full enterprisey and lost their competitive edge. I smell some sales oriented strategies.
You made me curious and I checked their financial report.
Gitlab spent 310M of their total 580M$ of operational costs in sales in 2022.
Those seem crazy numbers, I see similar ratios in other financial reports (such as Cloudflare's).
On one side it means that those companies are essentially cash positive the moment they cut sales expenses, on the other hand GitLab imho does not provide enough over some competitors such as GitHub to make me bet on them 10 years from now.
Without knowing anything my guess is that they give big discounts to large accounts and write that off as sales/marketing cost. Only that it doesn't work because if you don't give me that price again I'll just pull the plug.
I think it's a consequence of going public. Enterprise is where the money is at, and public companies have huge amounts of pressure to chase the money. I have a lot of love for GitLab, so I hope the strategy works and they can reinvest profits into making the product better for all developers, not just enterprise, but at this stage of their lifecycle it seems this is the strategy they have to play.
TBF, I don't think Gitlab was ever ahead of, or even close to, GitHub. They got a lot of hype here a couple years ago when everyone decided they hated GitHub now because boo Microsoft, but that didn't mean GL was an actual competitor. People who migrated on hype got burned.
When was GitLab ahead of GitHub? I've been using both for as long as I remember, I always thought GitLab is more marketing than GitHub. Believe or not, I prefer BitBucket because I don't care much for CI integrations.
While you might not value it, GitLab’s CI story was for a long time way better than GitHub and even a number of dedicated CI/CD providers. If you want to build and deploy microservices from a monorepo independently based on what changed in a PR, for instance, then GitLab supports that out of the box whereas you need to hack something together yourself on Buildkite.
GitHub actions has significantly reduced the gap, and at least for me that was GitLab’s killer feature.
Meh, there is something to be said for having "anything" over "nothing", but as with many of GitLab features, you inevitably found yourself deep down some years old issue of theirs to find why something is broken or obviously nonsensical. That's before they went batshit insane on development of even more unfinished stuff, while the core ergonomics (Lint CI button anyone?) continue to border on unusable.
Ironically GitHub actions are now the vastly superior experience, despite the lack of bullshit checkbox features. Turns out you don't need so many of them beyond the basic "run something on a worker" flow.
Ah, I see. I never bother with CI features. I was playing with all the CI providers when they came out. Never truly got comfortable with them to run my personal projects. At work, we can't use those anyway.
There was a tiny period where github was a bit stagnant and gitlab felt more capable. Felt a bit like mysql vs postgres. Now I think github got the lead back (slightly simpler UI/workflow). But i don't know much.
Yeah that was before Microsoft bought GitHub. GH had been constantly exceeding expectations and GitLab trying to play catch up (which smells of bad product strategy).
Gitlab spent 310M of their total 580M$ of operational costs in sales in 2022.
Those seem crazy numbers, I see similar ratios in other financial reports (such as Cloudflare's).
On one side it means that those companies are essentially cash positive the moment they cut sales expenses, on the other hand GitLab imho does not provide enough over some competitors such as GitHub to make me bet on them 10 years from now.