GitLab Review 2025: One Platform to Rule All Your DevOps (But Should It?)

My team was drowning in tools. We had GitHub for code, Jenkins for CI/CD, Jira for project management, SonarQube for code quality, Snyk for dependency scanning, Docker Hub for container images, and Confluence for documentation. Seven tools. Seven dashboards. Seven sets of credentials. Seven billing relationships. And a growing collection of brittle webhook integrations holding everything together with the digital equivalent of duct tape and prayers.

When our Jenkins server crashed for the third time in two months -- taking our entire CI/CD pipeline offline and blocking twelve developers from merging code for six hours -- our engineering lead slammed his laptop shut and said "we are moving to GitLab." He had been pushing for it for months. The rest of us were skeptical. GitHub was comfortable. Familiar. Everyone knew how to use it. But we were spending more time maintaining our toolchain than building our product, and something had to change.

That migration was eight months ago. Here is what I actually think now that the dust has settled.

Five Numbered Observations After Eight Months on GitLab

1. The CI/CD is genuinely better than what we had before. Not a little better. Significantly, noticeably, measurably better. Our .gitlab-ci.yml file replaced a mess of Jenkins pipelines, Groovy scripts, and shell scripts that only our senior engineer understood. Now our entire build, test, scan, and deploy pipeline is a single YAML file version-controlled in our repo. New team members read it and understand what our CI does. That was never true with Jenkins. The pipeline visualization in the GitLab UI shows stages, jobs, and dependencies as a clear directed graph -- I can see at a glance that the SAST scan is blocking the deploy stage and why. We went from "ask Dave how the Jenkins pipeline works" to "read the YAML." That cultural shift alone justified the migration.

2. The built-in security scanning is something we would never have set up ourselves. On our old stack, we had Snyk for dependency scanning and that was it. We talked about adding SAST and container scanning but never got around to it because setting up separate tools, integrating them with Jenkins, and figuring out how to surface results in pull requests was a project nobody wanted to own. On GitLab, I added four lines to our CI file and suddenly every merge request shows SAST results, dependency scan results, and secret detection results. It took an afternoon. We found a hardcoded API key on the first scan that had been in the codebase for two years. Nobody on the team had checked for that. Having security scanning just BE THERE by default -- not as a separate tool you have to set up and maintain -- changes whether teams actually do it.

3. The UI is cluttered and the learning curve is real. This is the complaint I hear most from my team and I cannot argue with it. GitLab tries to be everything, and the navigation reflects that ambition. The left sidebar has Plan, Code, Build, Secure, Deploy, Operate, Monitor, and Analyze sections, each with multiple sub-items. When you first log in, it is overwhelming. GitHub's navigation is cleaner and more focused because GitHub does fewer things. That is not necessarily a compliment to GitHub -- it is a statement about the trade-off between breadth and simplicity. Our junior developers took about three weeks to feel comfortable navigating GitLab. On GitHub, they were productive on day two.

4. Merge trains are the feature nobody talks about but everybody needs. Here is a problem that happens on every busy team: Developer A's merge request passes CI on the current main branch. Developer B's merge request also passes. Both get approved. A merges first. Now B's code has not been tested against A's changes, and when B merges, main breaks. This happens ALL THE TIME on GitHub. The fix is merge queues, which GitHub added recently, but GitLab's merge trains have been rock-solid for years. Merge trains automatically rebase and test each merge request against the latest main branch state before actually merging. We have not had a broken main branch since switching to GitLab. Not once in eight months. That is worth a lot.

5. The self-managed option is underappreciated. We are a SaaS company and we use gitlab.com so this does not affect us directly. But one of my previous employers was a healthcare company that could not use any cloud-hosted code platform due to regulatory requirements. They were stuck using an ancient on-premises SVN server. GitLab's self-managed Community Edition -- which is completely free, open source, and includes CI/CD -- would have been transformative for that team. GitHub Enterprise Server exists too, but it costs a fortune and is not open source. Gitea and Forgejo are lighter-weight self-hosted options, but they lack GitLab's CI/CD and security features. For organizations that need their code on their own servers, GitLab is in a category by itself.

The CI/CD System Deserves Its Own Section

I need to expand on the CI/CD because it is the reason most teams seriously consider GitLab, and my experience with it has been the most positive part of the migration.

Our pipeline runs in five stages: build, test, scan, staging deploy, and production deploy. Each stage contains multiple parallel jobs. The YAML syntax is cleaner than I expected -- stages define order, jobs define work, rules define conditions. The include keyword lets us break our pipeline into reusable templates, so the security scanning configuration is defined once and included in every project. The extends keyword reduces duplication within a single file. Variables, environments, and manual approvals for production deploys all work the way you would expect.

What surprised me was how good the built-in container registry is. On our old stack, we pushed Docker images to Docker Hub, which meant managing a separate account, separate credentials, and separate retention policies. On GitLab, the container registry is just there. Our CI builds an image, pushes it to the project's registry using built-in authentication (no extra credentials to configure), and our deploy job pulls it. Simple paths, no credential management, all visible in the same UI. One fewer thing to maintain.

The package registry covers npm, Maven, PyPI, NuGet, and more. We are a Node.js shop so we use it for internal npm packages. Publishing from CI is one command, and consuming packages from other projects uses standard npm authentication with a GitLab token. Again: one fewer external service. The pattern keeps repeating -- every feature that replaces an external tool is one fewer login, one fewer config, one fewer thing that can break at 3 AM.

GitLab Duo -- The AI Wild Card

GitLab Duo is their answer to GitHub Copilot. Code Suggestions works in supported IDEs and provides AI-assisted code completion. Chat lets you ask questions about your codebase. Vulnerability Explanation helps understand security scan results. Root Cause Analysis assists with incident response.

I will be blunt: it is not as good as Copilot. Not yet. The code suggestions are slower to appear, less context-aware, and less frequently accurate. The chat is useful for explaining unfamiliar code but it does not match Copilot Chat's depth. This is not surprising -- GitHub/Microsoft had a massive head start and deeper AI research resources. But GitLab Duo is improving rapidly, and the advantage of it being integrated into the same platform as your CI/CD and security scanning means it can eventually do things Copilot cannot -- like explaining a security vulnerability in the context of your specific pipeline results. That is a future differentiator. Today, Copilot wins.

The Merge Request vs Pull Request Debate

They are functionally the same thing. GitLab calls them merge requests, GitHub calls them pull requests. The workflow is identical: create a branch, make changes, open a request for review, discuss, iterate, merge. The experience on both platforms is good.

Where GitLab has an edge: merge requests show pipeline status, security scan results, code quality changes, test coverage changes, and deployment status all in one view. GitHub PRs show CI status and basic checks, but security scan results are in a separate tab, and you need third-party integrations for code quality and coverage. Where GitHub has an edge: the review UX is slightly more polished, suggestion commits are smoother, and the redesigned PR timeline is cleaner. Both platforms support approval rules, code owners, and branch protection. Neither is dramatically better than the other here. This is a wash.

Project Management: It Is Fine. Just Fine.

GitLab has issues, boards, milestones, and epics. The boards are Kanban-style with columns based on labels. Epics group related issues across projects. It works for basic sprint tracking and feature planning. Our team uses it and nobody complains about it, which is about the highest praise I can give a project management tool used by developers.

If you are coming from Jira, you will miss custom workflows, advanced reporting, sprint burndown charts, capacity planning, and the depth of field customization. If you are coming from Trello or GitHub Issues, GitLab's planning features will feel like a step up. The sweet spot is teams of 5-20 developers doing straightforward agile development. Larger organizations with complex project management needs will still want Jira or Linear alongside their code platform, which somewhat undermines GitLab's "single application" pitch.

What It Actually Costs

The Free tier gives you up to 5 users, 5 GB of storage, and 400 CI/CD minutes per month on shared runners. For a tiny team or an open-source project, that is genuinely usable. The self-managed Community Edition is free with unlimited users, which is an incredible deal if you have the infrastructure to host it.

Premium at twenty-nine dollars per user per month is where most professional teams land. You get merge approvals, code owners, protected environments, 10,000 CI/CD minutes, and enterprise agile planning features. This is the tier we use, and it covers everything our 14-person team needs.

Ultimate at ninety-nine dollars per user per month unlocks the full security scanning suite (SAST, DAST, dependency scanning, container scanning, fuzz testing), compliance management, value stream analytics, 50,000 CI/CD minutes, and GitLab Duo AI. For a 14-person team, that would be sixteen thousand six hundred and thirty-two dollars per year -- a significant jump from Premium's four thousand eight hundred seventy-two dollars. We evaluated Ultimate and decided the security scanning alone was not worth the sixty-seven percent price increase, so we kept Premium and added some security templates manually. That said, for organizations in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government) where the security and compliance features are not optional, Ultimate is competitive with buying those capabilities separately.

The comparison to GitHub is interesting. GitHub Team at four dollars per user per month is dramatically cheaper than GitLab Premium at twenty-nine dollars, but GitHub Team does not include comparable CI/CD, security scanning, or container registry features. GitHub Enterprise at twenty-one dollars per user per month gets closer to GitLab Premium in feature set. If you add a separate CI/CD tool (CircleCI, etc.) and a security scanning tool (Snyk, etc.) to GitHub, the total cost often exceeds GitLab Premium. The all-in-one pricing looks expensive until you add up what the piecemeal approach actually costs.

So Is It Worth Switching From GitHub?

This is the question I get asked most, and my answer is frustratingly nuanced: it depends on what is actually hurting you.

If your biggest pain is maintaining a fragmented toolchain -- if you are spending real engineering hours keeping Jenkins alive, configuring webhook integrations, managing separate security tools, and context-switching between five different dashboards -- then yes. GitLab's all-in-one approach will reduce that operational overhead and give your team more time to build product. That was our situation, and the migration was worth the three weeks of disruption and learning curve.

If your biggest need is the open-source community, AI-assisted development, and a polished user experience, stay on GitHub. GitLab cannot compete with GitHub's network effects, Copilot is meaningfully better than Duo, and the GitHub UI is simply more pleasant to use. These are not small advantages.

If you need self-hosting for regulatory or sovereignty reasons, GitLab is the obvious choice and probably the only serious one. The Community Edition gives you a full-featured DevOps platform for free, on your own servers, with your own data. Nothing else comes close.

If you are a small team (under 10 people) that mostly does straightforward web development, GitHub's free tier plus GitHub Actions is probably all you need. GitLab's advantages in CI/CD complexity and security scanning do not matter much if your pipeline is "run tests, deploy to Vercel." The additional cost and complexity of GitLab would not be justified.

If you are a large enterprise with hundreds of developers, complex deployment pipelines, strict security requirements, and a desire to consolidate your DevOps stack into one vendor -- GitLab Ultimate is worth evaluating seriously. The math on replacing four or five separate tools with one platform often works out in GitLab's favor, even at ninety-nine dollars per user per month.

Our team sits in the middle: 14 developers, moderately complex pipelines, standard web application development. For us, GitLab Premium has been the right call. But I will be honest -- I still keep a GitHub account for my personal projects and open-source contributions, because that is where the community is. GitLab is where we work. GitHub is where the world works. Whether those two things will ever be the same platform is a question I cannot answer.