“GitLab - enterprise grade, meaning it’s bloated and confusing but it’ll impress your boss. This could be the choice if you need multiple meetings to make the choice.“
Funny but not really true. It's not really any more bloated or confusing than Github. It's not really "enterprise grade" software. If you want that look at Jira or anything Microsoft produces.
We use gitlab at work, and I have to say that it is disappointing. The UI is so complicated to do the simplest things (e.g. to approve a MR you need to click a button that is actually a menu; the diffs are difficult to read; the 'To-do list' includes MRs that were already merged (how is that actionable?)) and it seems that they're struggling to turn around improvements quickly. The issue around the 'To-do list' including MRs that were already merged was raised years ago.
I also have to say that I'm surprised about the backlash against bitbucket. I find the UI incredibly simple and clear, as do all of the new joiners. With Script Runner you can do some pretty amazing things. It handles the huge repo's well too.
> to approve a MR you need to click a button that is actually a menu
It's not really any better on Github. Why do I have to click on "Files changed" to approve a PR? Overall I would say it is on par with Github. Worse in some ways; better in others.
We semi-recently had Gitlab reps stop by at work to demo their new AI features (we're already running Gitlab Enterprise). It was a strong signal that we should get off the train before the next major version. None of the features seemed very thought out and to top it all off, there was an outage while they were demo-ing it, leading to broken pages and no LLM responses.
> e.g. to approve a MR you need to click a button that is actually a menu
I think you're referring to the "Your review" button in the upper-right that's not always there, but there's a plain "Approve" button on the Overview tab that doesn't open any menu and is always there.
Made me chuckle. We use a self-hosted GitLab that I chose due to it having git and a container registry. The interface certainly can be confusing if you don't use the web UI often.