End-to-end AI pipelines have gained robust CI/CD automation and collaborative version control
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for GitLab is as a version control system that we are using. Currently, I am working on an end-to-end AI pipeline, and I have deployed my whole code using GitLab so that all things are utilized for version control for my back-end AI and front-end team. We merge all the Git codes into GitLab, and my CI/CD, issue tracking, security, and monitoring is maintained inside GitLab.
We try to collaborate with all the teams together on different features. Within GitLab, we are not utilizing Jenkins or any product management tools because it perfectly renders all the information. It maintains the version control system, which is very helpful to containerize and deploy all services, allowing us to have everything together in production.
What is most valuable?
CI/CD is the most important feature that I am utilizing with version control and security as well, and all things are very useful inside GitLab.
CI/CD helps my workflow by allowing me to integrate any new changes or any new version that I want to deploy in the whole ML lifecycle, which I implement through new integration phases and identify updates in the deployment scripts. We generate YAML manifest files, add dependencies, and deploy them utilizing GitLab's versioning system, identifying any security patches that need to be added or incidents that need to be managed, triggering the workflow. We try to manage the perfect scenarios.
GitLab has impacted my organization positively in terms of version control systems, providing many smart features and reducing the sharing of dependencies compared to what we used to do previously. It has helped the organization merge and collaborate within the team on the level of code accesses and identify how actionable insights can be inputted within the whole pipelining mechanisms, allowing us to easily perform actions on CI/CD. My organization has adapted this and resulted in more productive work.
What needs improvement?
There are many improvements that GitLab can implement, such as addressing the issue of caching. Currently, when I have multiple tasks to merge or attempt multiple merges, the CI/CD and overall GitLab processes get slower. Implementing caching to allow parallel jobs to execute together would optimize the solution and enhance efficiency.
The UI is not user-friendly compared to how GitHub Actions operates. If we could customize the UI interface or have options for plugin-based mechanisms, that would be more suitable and increase DevOps in enterprises.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using GitLab for around three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
GitLab's scalability is good, allowing multiple employees to work together, change code collectively, and perform all kinds of CI/CD regardless of impacts from bug fixes.
How are customer service and support?
I have not reached out to customer support currently, but email support is very good, although I have not interacted with any call-based mechanisms or voice call systems.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I was using GitHub and GitHub Actions prior to this. While GitHub Actions provided good CI/CD operations, GitLab has added smart features, such as a graphical view of branches in version control mechanisms and tracking changes made by authors at specified times. Everything is maintained perfectly in my codebase, and I can easily track buggy code, identifying issues with excellent visibility. This visibility compared to GitHub and GitHub Actions is what led me to switch to GitLab.
How was the initial setup?
The setup cost for GitLab is minimal since the team has its own minimal resource balancing. The costing falls into an intermediate stage and is impactful across all results within the team. It allows for CI/CD stages and addition of security patches smoothly, with only a slight charge that is not significant. Everything related to scripting, processing, management, and deployment works fine.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment with increased collaboration within the team resulting in more productive work and a reduction in time based on prior experiences, which emphasizes GitLab's usefulness.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The setup cost for GitLab is minimal since the team has its own minimal resource balancing. The costing falls into an intermediate stage and is impactful across all results within the team. It allows for CI/CD stages and addition of security patches smoothly, with only a slight charge that is not significant. Everything related to scripting, processing, management, and deployment works fine.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing GitLab, I evaluated options like GitLens and Bitbucket. I have tried those tools prior to this project, but ultimately, I chose GitLab as the foremost solution for version control mechanisms.
What other advice do I have?
Since using GitLab, we have experienced fewer errors in identification, and any incidents coming out at the production level can be maintained to facilitate complete results, ensuring that collaboration works fine and deployment scripts remain easily executable, maintaining all services perfectly. Any impactful scripts work fine, whether making minor or major version updates.
I recommend GitLab if you are looking for a good graph-based solution or any impeccable solution for version mechanisms. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.
Great Automation Tools with Easy Pipelines and Strong Documentation
What do you like best about the product?
Great tools for automation. Development and documentation. Piplining is easy to do.
What do you dislike about the product?
Needs to be trained first. The configuration needs to be done properly and is very complex for the first time. Project setup is abit complex at first.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Automation, Collaborative working environment.
All-in-One Platform That Streamlines Workflow—Even on the Free Tier
What do you like best about the product?
Everything is in one place, so I don’t have to jump between five different tools just to get a feature live. Code hosting, CI/CD pipelines, security scanning, and even project planning (like Kanban boards) are all under one roof, which makes the workflow feel much more streamlined. The "Free" tier also goes a long way: you get a lot of useful features, including private repositories and a decent amount of CI/CD runner minutes, that other platforms might charge for.
What do you dislike about the product?
Lonely community: GitHub is the “social network” for code. If you’re looking for contributors for an open-source project, you’ll get far more visibility on GitHub than on GitLab.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It keeps security from becoming an afterthought. Instead of the “security guy” coming back a week later to yell at me, GitLab scans my code as I’m writing it and flags potential vulnerabilities right away.
And if you’re at a company that has to prove it follows strict rules (compliance), GitLab automatically tracks what you need. You don’t have to manually cobble together an audit trail.
Reliable, User-Friendly GitLab with Powerful Automation and Integrations
What do you like best about the product?
GitLab brings together key features for code versioning, pipelines, and webhooks in one place. Its automation is very effective and significantly reduces manual effort. In my experience, it runs reliably and integrates smoothly with other infrastructure tools such as Kubernetes, CloudFront, and similar services. Gitlab's UI is super user friendly
What do you dislike about the product?
For a new user it can be a bit complex to understand and start using it, it might take some time to efficiently use it
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
GitLab helps consolidate multiple development tools into a single platform. Instead of relying on separate systems for version control, CI/CD, issue tracking, and code reviews, it brings everything together in one place, making day-to-day work easier to manage and keep organized.
Fine-Grained Permissions and Self-Hosting Make GitLab a Win
What do you like best about the product?
I mostly use GitLab for Git repository management and CI/CD pipelines. The pipeline system is very flexible and makes it easy to automate builds, tests, and deployments. I know GitLab has many more features like issue and bug tracking, but I haven’t used those much yet. What I do like is the fine-grained control over permissions, and the fact that it can be self-hosted, which gives us more control over our infrastructure.
What do you dislike about the product?
I have not encountered any negative points so far
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Beyond the basic Git features, GitLab also powers our full CI/CD pipeline and hosts our private npm, Composer, and Docker registries. We currently run over 200 private repositories on our self-hosted GitLab instance, so it has become a central part of how we manage code and deployments.
GitLab makes it much easier for our development teams to collaborate across multiple projects. With CI/CD pipelines in place, code is automatically checked, built, and deployed, which has saved our teams a significant amount of time and reduced manual steps in our release process. We have set up our own self hosted runners for the CI/CD pipelines and the documentation on setting up the auto scaling for this is very good.
there is also a fully automated API which we have used for automation and various other tasks.
Easy Pipeline Integration with Strong Non-Repudiation
What do you like best about the product?
As a cloud cybersecurity engineer, I love how easy it is to integrate our security tools into the pipelines and the level of non-repudiation.
What do you dislike about the product?
The default search is extremely bad. We've looked at multiple tools to replace the default search with and every single one has been better than the supplied search.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Code repository and CI/CD.
Effortless Collaboration with Robust Automation
What do you like best about the product?
I like the automation feature in GitLab, which runs tests on its own every day. It's really helpful that it makes accessibility for other team members very easy, allowing us to actively collaborate on the project and maintain a common repository to be shared with everyone. Also, the initial setup of GitLab is very easy and straightforward.
What do you dislike about the product?
There's nothing specific like that. But the push and pull can be a bit better. The code, which I have pushed, if I can't revert a specific part of it, I have to revert everything back if there is any issue with the code.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I use GitLab to store all project files and repositories in one place. It automates daily tests, enhancing accessibility and collaboration for my team.
All-in-One Platform for Code Hosting, CI/CD, and Issue Tracking
What do you like best about the product?
Good to store code and keep track of different issues include features:
Git repository hosting, CI/CD pipelines, Issue tracking & boards, Code reviews & merge requests, Container registry, Security scanning tools
What do you dislike about the product?
well most features are good and useful but UI is sometime slow if project is large, for self hosted it uses more resources. need to learn before uses else can get lost
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
it helps keeping source code secure and within boundary of company for employee and client. keep list of tasks, bugs for project.
Integrated task tracking and documentation have streamlined collaboration and code workflows
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working in my current field between five to ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
GitLab is very stable. I have not seen any instability issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
GitLab is highly scalable and could very easily scale to thousands of code repos, which is necessary for any organizational size.
How are customer service and support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Personally, I have previously used GitHub and Bitbucket as well. I find that GitLab has the cleanest and clearest UI out of all of them, and it has numerous features, such as the Issues and Epics tracking feature, as well as the Wiki feature, which sets it apart.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, to my understanding, GitLab offers competitive rates. There are a few big competitors within this space, such as GitHub and Bitbucket, so GitLab prices themselves competitively.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Powerful Integrated CI/CD and Merge Requests for Seamless Code Reviews
What do you like best about the product?
The absolute standout feature is the integrated CI/CD. the gitlab yml file is a very powerful tool. Merge requests feature is also amazing for peer coding and proper reviews
What do you dislike about the product?
i personally dont like the search functionality inside the code base, many times you will search for a word or phrase and it wont be able to fetch it in the files
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
GitLab provides all capabilities (code, cicd, docker hub registry) in a single application
