| No, paying for GH doesn't make the code review experience any better. It's identical across public/cloud/enterprise GH. I do not know if GitLab does anything different; I've never used it in anger. I'd bet $10 the answer is "no, it's basically just the same as GitHub", though. If you want a service that adds stacking on top of GitHub, my conclusion after some research is that https://graphite.dev/ is the best option. We did consider it, but it couldn't work in my last job for "reasons" (see my other replies in this thread) but if you've got a shop of Git users and just want to throw money at the problem, I think it's the best choice. GerritHub is also a possibility, they employ many of the Gerrit devs and know what they're doing, but holy shit the corporate options are expensive out of the gate. It's like $20k/yr minimum regardless of size or number of users. Honestly, Graphite is cheap as hell considering how much more productive your engineers can be with a good review tool. Gerrit was basically night and day for us. It's not "oh, it pays for itself really quickly in a few days!" You'd probably pay off the monthly cost in less than an hour of actual code review. And you don't even have to opt most of your engineers in; you can trial it where 90% of them use GH and only a subset use graphite and pay. |
It's very buggy. My stacks frequently just hang and become unmergeable.
It frequently gets confused about its state and "gt sync" thinks that the upstream has changed even when it hasn't.
Because of the three states involved (local, GitHub, and Graphite), there is a lot of "syncing". "gt submit", "gt track", "gt untrack", "gt sync" are all needed constantly, which adds mental overhead over the usual git pull/push.
You end up with a lot of force-push churn in the GitHub PR activity when re-stacking. In fact, I dread syncing anything because in 6-PR stack it could cause an avalanche of force-pushes. This is of course a side effect of the GitHub PRs model and their rebase approach.
The web UI is pretty terrible. It's full of AI crap, and there's a "meme library". It kind of seems like they want people to live in their app, taking over from GitHub. But they don't really offer a reason whatsoever to go to graphite.dev instead of GitHub. Graphite doesn't really help the review process.
They really want you to sell you their merge queue product.
In short, when it works it's fine. It's nice to do a series of PRs and then watch as it merges them. But it's not a tool I enjoy using, for the above reasons.
I'd prefer a lightweight tool that just managed PRs and then did the merge magic. Graphite just wants to be too much.