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by lopkeny12ko 1193 days ago
Contrary to the common opinion here, I've really enjoyed using GitLab and don't see many problems with it.

Lot of the comments here complaining about pricing. Please remember that GitLab's core is open source. If you think the managed offering is too expensive, just host an instance yourself. This is what I have been doing at home for years, and my company at work for even longer.

2 comments

I think the main reason why I dislike the pricing is that there's no way to buy seats with different premium tiers. I'm sure they've done the maths, but it's a very hard sell to just upgrade from the community edition, knowing that you'll have to now restrict the instance knowing that even a casual user (marketing, sys.engineers, mech engineers, etc) will cost the same price...when that limitation just doesn't exist if you don't pay anything at all! It's just counterintuitive.

Good luck trying to get buy in for the Ultimate tier (1200$ per year vs 300$ for the normal paid tier) when only a few users need or use the improved reporting/security featuresEven if it's not a huge cost per se, it makes most premium features a lot less attractive. And remember, you can self host Github Enterprise for a lot less than Gitlab now.

Again, I'm convinced they know how to price their product a lot better than us, but as an enduser, it's a bummer. Because Gitlab is still an amazing product, if just for their open source core alone. So I really hope they figure out a way to be sustainable.

My small company pays for GitLab and I don't see the bill directly, but I definitely have enjoyed working with GitLab. GitHub actions may be catching up but GitLab ci/cd tools have worked great for a while now for us.