External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
I use ClickHouse and get logs from ClickHouse. I use Loki sometimes. Prometheus is always a thing with Grafana that I use hand-to-hand. Mostly it's Loki and ClickHouse.
I had tried to use TimescaleDB once, but it wasn't an easier option to integrate and set things up, so I just lifted it off and I'm using Loki and ClickHouse for now.
My company doesn't allow me to use any cloud-based services as of now, so everything has to be on-premises and self-hosted. For that reason, I don't use any additional third-party services. But in the near future, when I have the flexibility and liberty of doing it in my organization, I would definitely choose to go for third-party options.
I use GitLab. I use GitLab on our own independent storage servers over here and everything is in-house as I said. We use GitLab and version control all of our codebases and model artifacts and other assets locally in our own storage servers.
The main reason we use GitLab is because we are not supposed to store our code on any other external cloud services. We need to have our own in-house storage solution and in-house version controlling system. Any architecture that we design, we need to have it in-house and air-gapped from the rest of the world. Everything has to be in our control. The bare-metal vertical integration of having servers in our own premises is the reason why I use GitLab.
I appreciate the UI. It's very simple as well as intuitive at the same time. The biggest functionality that I appreciate is that GitLab gives you the liberty to self-host things on your own and keeps things on-premises, as well as being very API-friendly, similar to the original GitHub. There is no cumbersome learning curve to adapt GitLab separately from GitHub. It's a seamless transition switching from the standard GitHub to GitLab.
It's a good UI to work with. GitLab is a consolidation of all of the services. I can use my Docker container builds and my images and store them locally. I can pull those builds and use Docker as well as integrate Docker in the version control pipeline. It becomes very seamless. Sometimes my containers go down or I need to spin up a new node of a computer on its own in my local infrastructure. The system already has a cron job which goes and fetches the appropriate Docker, the latest Docker build with the correct Docker image and it pulls it off.
I would appreciate some more tutorials being put out in the mainstream media like on YouTube, where I could go and learn more about GitLab. Reading a deep dive into the documentation and meddling things on my own, then going and educating my whole team on that is a cumbersome task. I would appreciate if nice, customized YouTube tutorials would be available on YouTube by the official GitLab or maybe by some third-party YouTubers that you guys could partner with, similar to what PyTorch or Weights & Biases have done to democratize the use of their software tools. That would be great on my end.
I have been using GitLab Premium for exactly two years.
I would give a rating of eleven in that case, because we never had a downtime with GitLab Premium. It has never let us down.
I couldn't have an opinion on that because, as I said, we do things in-house. Scalability and the type of auto-scaling or scale-up that we need to do is on my system administrators.
It is complex. It takes a good amount of time. Had I had to do it again, I would definitely use an AI agent to do it, because back then two years ago, when I was setting up GitLab Premium on my own in my enterprise, I had to take a good amount of four days to set things up and to seamlessly test everything so that things are working perfectly across my teams.
As of now, I haven't used that. My organization is pretty slim. Our technical team picks up things on their own and does things on their own independently. It's a one-man army kind of developer space in our organization. For that reason, we don't have any cross-communication with developers. Whatever happens, happens verbally, and for that reason, we don't use Jira or any other ticketing solutions.
It's not my responsibility. I have a system admin who looks into the security part of it, but we haven't meddled with any specific functionalities in the security side of it. Whatever we get standard in-house with the default configurations, we just use it.
There are several alternate solutions available.
We don't work in code review. Our developers write their own test cases. Once the test cases pass, the code goes into the specific another department. A solutions architect or a tech lead would be a suitable role for implementation of GitLab Premium. I give this product a rating of ten out of ten.
My main use case for GitLab is utilizing it in three main ways: one is using the Issues and Epics tracking for tasks, the second way is using the Wiki, which is the documentation feature, and then the third way is for code management.
Out of those three, I find myself using the Issues and Epics tracking feature the most often. I really quite like it because I find it clear and clean to use, and it works well when using it with numerous people.
We use the Issues feature to record our tasks and assign those out, as well as recording the description of what the task requires. Then we use the Epics feature to group the issues into categories, which makes it easier to track the tasks at a higher level.
In my opinion, the best features GitLab offers are the Issues and Epics feature, which I find very clean and clear to use, and it is very quick and responsive. I also quite value the Wiki feature because both of those are built into the same platform, making it very easy to bounce between the two and create links between the boards and the Wiki.
The ability to link between the boards and the Wiki helps my workflow and collaboration with my team by ensuring that if we have any tasks that need to be carried out, we have them on the Issues board, and we write runbooks in the Wiki on how to carry out the task. We copy the link of the Wiki and put it into the description of the tickets so that when someone is working on the ticket, they can very quickly go over to the Wiki and know how to carry out their task, which saves us time.
GitLab has positively impacted our organization by making our code very secure because GitLab prides itself on security. Storing code in GitLab is a very secure way to do it, and from an operational efficiency and time-saving perspective, the Issues and Epics board is definitely helpful, offering a few benefits operationally.
The only feature I have used in GitLab that I thought could be improved is their code generation feature. When I previously used it, some of my questions were met with responses saying that it did not know the answer, and some responses were incorrect as well. I understand this is something new for them, so they are still developing it, but I do not feel that it is in a position where I would use it regularly just because it is not very reliable right now.
I have been working in my current field between five to ten years.
GitLab is very stable. I have not seen any instability issues.
GitLab is highly scalable and could very easily scale to thousands of code repos, which is necessary for any organizational size.
The customer support for GitLab is very good, and I have no complaints because they have always been quite helpful. I would rate the customer support a ten out of ten because I have never had any issues with them before, and they are very knowledgeable.
Positive
I have seen a return on investment. Any company that generates its own code and develops applications needs a code base, so it is more of a necessity rather than choosing something because it results in a measurable benefit. However, in terms of operational efficiency, a ten to twenty percent increase in speed could quite easily be seen from using the Issues and Epics tracking feature.
Before choosing GitLab, I did evaluate other options, and the main competitors I considered were GitHub and Bitbucket. They are great as well, and all three are brilliant, but GitLab, in my opinion, has the cleanest UI, which sets it apart.
I would recommend others to use GitLab because it is a great tool and there are not any real major drawbacks, just a minor one related to the AI code generation. I have given this review an overall rating of nine out of ten.
We are working with Black Duck, but we do have some plans to move to another vendor down the line.
Black Duck is used mostly for security checks. For coverage, we are using a tool called SonarQube.
Black Duck is explicitly used for security checks on code, for example, open-source software.
We perform scans with Black Duck Security Checker, but software developers handle the post-remediations and mitigation of risks and vulnerabilities.
For CI/CD, we are using GitLab Premium for our repositories. We have Artifactory for all artifact storage from JFrog Artifactory. We have Black Duck for security checks, SonarQube for coverage and unit testing, and Ansible for configuration management along with other tools.
These tools are used for our CI/CD pipelines, running all our pipelines and having unit test cases executed with SonarQube and Black Duck for security checks.
GitLab Premium is a one-place platform. You don't have to jump between other tools for multi-stage scanning. You can run multi-stage pipelines all together from building source code, testing source code, running test cases, performing security checks, deploying CI/CD, and end-to-end integration to deployment all in one place.
It is quick and fast. The pipelines run quicker, and the background job processes are efficient. It is multi-threaded operation so it is quite fast.
It is simple to use. You just need to have a good knowledge base, and by getting hands-on experience, you are all set.
It could be better, but now that we have migrated to Siemens Energy, GitLab Premium is being actively looked after by another team. We are just making sure that GitLab Premium administration is being done by us.
We are not using the security testing capabilities in GitLab Premium. For security we are using a separate tool.
The automation part could be improved. Nowadays AI is being actively used, and if we could integrate something like ChatGPT with GitLab Premium, it would be easier for us to check logs and debug faster.
We could integrate security and coverage built-in within GitLab Premium instead of relying on third-party tools.
I have been working with GitLab Premium for the last four years.
GitHub is a product I can compare with GitLab Premium.
GitLab Premium is much more reliable, quicker, faster, and basically easier to operate compared to GitHub. It is easy to get things on track. GitHub requires a lot of knowledge. It is easy to spin up any kind of environment and it is easy to be hosted.
We were on the desktop, and now GitLab Premium is on cloud.
I am not really sure about the purchase process for GitLab Premium.
I am a GitLab Premium end-user.
I give this product a rating of eight out of ten.
I have been using GitLab since I started my journey in IT because GitLab is important for all software developers, DevOps, and SREs in all fields in IT. I have been using it for a long time.
My main use case for GitLab is source code management combined with CI/CD automation. I use GitLab to host application and infrastructure code, manage branches, and merge requests, and run automated CI/CD pipelines that build, test, and deploy applications across every environment. As an SRE-focused DevOps professional, I primarily use GitLab for end-to-end DevOps workflows from version control to automated CI/CD, triggering pipelines on every commit, running tests and security scans, building Docker images, and deploying to cloud or Kubernetes environments using GitLab Runners. This is how I use it day-to-day.
Using GitLab for this DevOps workflow has significantly improved my efficiency and my team's efficiency by centralizing the entire DevOps workflow, code, CI/CDs, reviews, and deployments in one platform. This reduces tool hopping and makes collaboration much smoother. First, GitLab enables faster and safer deployments. Standardized pipelines and approval-based merge requests ensure consistent deployments across environments, reducing production issues. Secondly, quick issue detection and rollback are facilitated through pipeline failures and job logs, which help identify problems early, and version releases make rollbacks faster and safer. Automation reduces manual work as CI/CD pipelines automatically build, test, scan, and deploy on every commit, saving hours of manual effort and eliminating human errors. The fourth point is infrastructure as code at scale; managing Terraform and Ansible code in GitLab allows repeatable, auditable infrastructure changes with clear history. Finally, improved reliability and confidence arise because automated testing and security scans increase confidence in releases and reduce post-deployment incidents.
Another valuable aspect is better collaboration and visibility, which comes with merge requests, inline reviews, and pipeline status checks, making it easy for the team and me to review changes and catch issues early.
GitLab has had a significant overall positive impact on my organization by standardizing and automating how we build, test, and deploy software. Having code management, CI/CD, security, and collaboration in a single platform improves speed, reliability, and transparency across teams.
The improvements have resulted in faster and more reliable releases. We replaced manual deployments with automated CI/CD pipelines, which have made releases predictable and repeatable, with deployment time reduced from hours to minutes. Another improvement is reduced production incidents; mandatory pipeline tests and approvals before merges and early failure detection through automated checks lead to standardized deployment processes across environments.
Additional improvement comes through shift-left security, where security scanning built directly into pipelines detects vulnerabilities early rather than in production, eliminating the need for separate security tools for basic scanning. Finally, better onboarding and knowledge sharing occur through standardized CI/CD templates and documented pipelines, allowing new team members to become productive faster while reducing dependency on tribal knowledge.
In my view, the best features GitLab offers include integrated CI/CD, which is one of GitLab's strongest capabilities. We define pipelines in a .gitlab-ci.yml file and runners execute them automatically on commits and merge requests. It automates building, testing, and deploying, eliminates manual release steps, and includes quality, security, and compliance stages, while also being easy to scale with GitLab Runners, leading to faster feedback loops, fewer human errors, and consistent deployments.
The second feature I would mention is merge requests, which combine collaboration, review, and automation in one place. This impacts better code quality, cleaner history, and structured team collaboration. The third point is built-in security scanning, as GitLab offers automatic scanning integrated into pipelines including SAST, DAST, and dependency scanning, making security a part of our CI/CD pipeline rather than an afterthought.
Lastly, pipeline visualization and insights help us understand delays or failures with graphical pipeline views, job logs, and metrics such as pipeline duration and failure rates.
A pain point I have encountered with GitLab is that large GitLab-ci.yml files become hard to read and maintain. YAML syntax is strict, and errors are easy to make, while debugging pipeline logic can sometimes take time, leading to slower iteration when the pipeline grows complex. I propose an improvement idea of better visual pipeline editors and stronger validations and linting before a commit.
Regarding runner management and scaling, managing self-hosted runners requires effort and scaling runners during peak usage can be challenging, which leads to pipeline delays during high load. An expected improvement here is smarter auto-scaling by default, along with better runner health visibility and alerts.
Concerning security features, advanced security scans are locked behind paid tiers, limiting coverage for smaller teams unless the budget allows. I suggest introducing more basic security features in the free tier and clearer guidance on prioritizing vulnerabilities.
Another area for improvement is UI performance and navigation. Finding older pipelines or logs or settings sometimes takes extra clicks, leading to small but noticeable productivity loss. An improvement would be a faster UI for large repositories and enhanced global search and filtering.
I started my journey in 2021, and since my first organization, I have been working in my current field as a Site Reliability Engineer for nearly five years.
GitLab is pretty stable in my experience. I have not experienced any downtime or reliability issues so far.
GitLab's scalability is really great, and it handles growth in users, projects, or workloads effectively, helping us in every aspect.
I have not interacted with GitLab's customer support because I have not faced downtime or any significant issues while using GitLab. Therefore, my experience is great since I have not encountered any issues requiring support.
Positive
I have not used any other solution before GitLab, as I started using GitLab right from the beginning of my career in IT.
My experience with GitLab's pricing, setup cost, and licensing is very positive. GitLab follows a tier-based licensing model that includes free, premium, and ultimate options. I have experience with the free tier and later evaluated the paid tiers mainly for advanced security, compliance, and governance features. I found pricing reasonable for the value, especially when compared to buying separate tools for CI/CD, security, and repo management.
I can share concrete ROI metrics and examples that focus on time saved, costs avoided, and risks reduced. For instance, with deployment automation, before GitLab, it took two engineers one to two hours per deployment, but after implementing GitLab CI/CD, it only needs one engineer and takes 10 to 15 minutes, resulting in a 70 to 85% reduction in deployment effort and saving dozens of engineering hours per month. Additionally, we see cost avoidance from reduced production incidents, so automated tests, approvals, and pipelines minimize human error, showing a 30 to 40% reduction in deployment-related incidents, which results in less downtime and fewer after-hours escalations.
After adopting GitLab, I can share some measurable outcomes. Before GitLab, deployment time took one to two hours for manual steps and coordination, and now it is down to 10 to 15 minutes, reflecting a 75 to 85% reduction in deployment time. Regarding release frequency, previously we had one to two releases per week, but now we achieve daily or on-demand releases, resulting in a three to five-fold increase in release frequency. In terms of production incidents, we faced frequent post-deployment issues before GitLab, but we now see a noticeable drop due to automated tests and approvals, with a 30 to 40% reduction in deployment-related incidents.
The setup cost was moderate and not very high. For GitLab SaaS, the initial setup cost was minimal, while self-managed GitLab involved infrastructure, VM storage backups, runner configuration, and integrations, which I also found moderate.
Before choosing GitLab, I did evaluate other options, specifically Bitbucket in combination with Jenkins. We started exploring Bitbucket, but after weighing the pros and cons, I decided to move to GitLab.
I would advise others looking into using GitLab to definitely go for it because it has really good features. Start simple, then scale by not building complex pipelines from day one; instead, begin with basic build, test, and deploy stages, adding security scans, approvals, and optimizations gradually. This keeps pipelines readable and reduces early frustrations.
Use reusable CI/CD templates to create organization-wide pipeline standards, which improves consistency, decreases duplication, and speeds up onboarding. Additionally, invest early in a runner strategy to decide between SaaS runners and self-hosted runners, planning for auto-scaling and isolation to prevent runner bottlenecks. Finally, monitor and optimize pipelines by tracking duration and failure rates, removing slow or flaky jobs to ensure fast feedback that keeps developers engaged and productive.
The reviews I provided are genuinely positive because I find GitLab to be an excellent product for us in IT. Honestly, there are other products in the market that serve as alternatives to GitLab, but I cannot envision working in IT, especially in servers, deployment, or CI/CD, without GitLab. I am a huge fan of GitLab, and my experience working with it has been wonderful; it has greatly aided our teams by reducing human errors and the number of personnel required. My overall review rating for GitLab is 9 out of 10.
GitLab is a major help for DevOps automation, primarily for version controlling and deployment purposes. I use GitLab for DevOps automation and version control in my daily work by creating many branches for each environment through which deployments can be controlled and version control can be maintained. When we need to make a change only for the dev environment, we simply make the code change for the dev branch, and only the servers connected to the dev branch receive those changes applied while the rest remains the same. In a similar way, we can particularly target a group of servers, which prevents other issues from occurring. GitLab helps tremendously in this purpose.
GitLab has role-based access control, so when a team member needs to make a code change, they cannot directly apply it to the environment but must put in a merge request. Once a senior reviews the code and approves it, then it is implemented across the environment, making it safer and allowing everyone to experience the process.
The best features GitLab offers are version control and automation, which are the major things that stand out to me. When it comes to access, the login is very smooth, with just one login integrated with our Okta, allowing everyone to log in easily. Deployments become much easier, and that is how GitLab helps.
The automation features make my work easier because we use a tool called AWX, which is connected to GitLab. Whenever we run a job on AWX, it directly checks the code and uses it. Since the code is not preserved locally but kept in the cloud, it is safe and nobody can tamper with it. When it comes to safety, that is a major thing. Automation features allow the code to be accessed from any tools we use, so the jobs we run are helping tremendously and doing their work perfectly.
For pipeline tasks, we have created a significant amount of pipelines, which are all hosted in GitLab. Running the pipelines has become much easier, and they are doing a perfect job, helping tremendously in our day-to-day activities.
GitLab has positively impacted my organization because previously we stored code locally on servers, leading to many risks. Since GitLab came into our environment, our integration and deployments became much easier, helping our work become much smoother.
Improvements from GitLab have led to better team collaboration because when several people are working, they can all edit the code and submit it as a merge request, and once approved, it reflects directly to the main branch. Many can work at the same time. When it comes to deployments, deploying has become much faster since we started using GitLab, and even if errors occur, we can spot them easily and troubleshoot, which has helped tremendously.
I believe GitLab can be improved by making integration with other platforms a little easier. I understand it is a matter of security, but it would be much more helpful if it could integrate with other tools more seamlessly.
When it comes to speed, if multiple users are committing their codes, it takes a bit longer, which I think can be improved. Fine-tuning resources might help, but apart from that, I have not felt many improvements, as everything is going smoothly.
I have been using GitLab for the last five years.
GitLab has been very scalable in my experience. Even as our count of servers and applications grows, we can still support our needs with GitLab, which is why I find it very scalable.
I have had experiences with GitLab's customer support, and they have been very supportive. I have not faced any issues from their side till today.
Negative
I have not used a different solution before GitLab. From the day I started working in my organization, I have been using GitLab. While I heard they were storing all the codes locally on servers previously, I have not experienced that.
Before choosing GitLab, my organization evaluated other options such as Jira and Atlassian, but the major advantage of GitLab led us to choose it.
I would rate GitLab a 10 on a scale of one to ten because it is perfect in all ways. I choose 10 because the offerings provided by GitLab are very useful in aspects like deployment, team collaboration, and deployment speed, all of which GitLab helps with tremendously.
If you are looking for faster deployment, team collaboration, version control, and better use of CI/CD pipelines, my advice is that GitLab is the best option for you, so go and try it out. I give GitLab an overall rating of 10.