I've had to compare the two. At the current state, Stash is better than GitLab in almost all ways. Better UI, more features and other small things that make a big difference (e.g. repo sync).
GitLab, on the other hand, has two advantages over Stash. Firstly it's open source (+free). Secondly and most importantly, GitLab is under active development and there is a new release with reasonable amount of content every month.
I haven't installed Stash, but for what it's worth GitLab installation and upgrades have been really straightforward.
GitLab, on the other hand, has two advantages over Stash ... GitLab is under active development and there is a new release with reasonable amount of content every month.
No.
Stash 2.9 was just released [1] about seven weeks after Stash 2.8 [2] about seven weeks after Stash 2.7 [3].
I was trying out GitLab EE and ran into some install issues on RHEL5 (which were solvable - http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/general/installing... ). However even after a couple days I was unable to get the LDAP integration and LDAP group permissions to work correctly. GitLab support wasn't able to solve it for me, so I tried Stash. 30 minutes later, up and running the way I wanted it.
Hi Modoc, GitLab.com co-founder here. I'm sorry to hear you GitLab.com support did not solve your problem to your satisfaction. Supporting our customers is our main priority. Feel free to email me at sytse@gitlab.com if you want to give us feedback about what happend.
Last time I've tried to install (~ 9-10 months ago):
- Stash: it was a no-brainer (easy setup, easy use).
- GitLab: hours spent with frustration (hard to setup, but this might have changed now, I need to try it again).
Stash seem to have a larger team behind it, with more features, documentation and snappier responses, but GitLab is promising too. I hope they all can be profitable and keep up the speed of improvements in all of the products.
We're using Gitlab at work, our sysops set it up so I can't speak to the pain of dealing with that but overall the experience has been positive switching from Gitolite and Gitblit. If I had known about stash before they started implementing gitlab I may have suggested it though. I much prefer the Bitbucket interface to the Github.
Few pain points about Gitlab, large diffs cannot be merged or diffed through a merge request which is our preferred way to merge branches since you can autoclose the branches from there and provide the per line comments on the diff. The diff display currently has no option to hide whitespace (though they are open to pull requests that implement the `?w=1` convention github does.
Other than that thought I can't say I've had a negative experience with Gitlab.
I set Gitlab up for the internal development team at work and we love it. The installation isn't a one-click affair that many people are used to nowadays but it's not hard.
One of the reasons that we chose Gitlab is because it's open source. We've made some tweaks to it so that it better fits our needs.
GitLab, on the other hand, has two advantages over Stash. Firstly it's open source (+free). Secondly and most importantly, GitLab is under active development and there is a new release with reasonable amount of content every month.
I haven't installed Stash, but for what it's worth GitLab installation and upgrades have been really straightforward.