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BrowserStack vs GitLab: What are the differences?

  1. BrowserStack vs. GitLab: BrowserStack is a cloud-based platform that provides instant access to 2000+ real mobile and desktop browsers while GitLab is a web-based DevOps lifecycle tool that provides a Git repository manager providing wiki, issue-tracking, and CI/CD pipeline features out of the box.
  2. Development vs. Testing: GitLab is primarily focused on the development aspect of software engineering, providing tools for version control, issue tracking, code review, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, while BrowserStack is used more for testing purposes, allowing developers to test their applications on a wide range of browsers, devices, and operating systems.
  3. Scope of Usage: BrowserStack is specifically designed for cross-browser compatibility testing and mobile app testing, whereas GitLab is an integrated tool for the entire software development life cycle, including planning, development, testing, and deployment.
  4. Pricing Models: BrowserStack operates on a subscription-based pricing model, where users pay for the number of parallel sessions or minutes used, while GitLab offers different pricing tiers based on the number of users and features required, with a free tier available for small teams.
  5. Collaboration Features: GitLab shines in terms of collaboration features, offering robust merge request functionalities, issue tracking, project management tools, and built-in chat functionality, whereas BrowserStack focuses more on providing a seamless testing environment for individual developers or testing teams.
  6. Support and Community: GitLab has a strong open-source community and extensive documentation to support users, whereas BrowserStack provides dedicated customer support and onboarding assistance to help users navigate their testing platform effectively.

In Summary, BrowserStack and GitLab differ in their primary focus on testing versus development, scope of usage, pricing models, collaboration features, and support offerings.

Advice on BrowserStack and GitLab

I am looking to purchase one of these tools for Mobile testing for my team. It should support Native, hybrid, and responsive app testing. It should also feature debugging, parallel execution, automation testing/easy integration with automation testing tools like Selenium, and the capability to provide availability of devices specifically for us to use at any time with good speed of performing all these activities.

I have already used Perfecto mobile, and Sauce Labs in my other projects before. I want to know how different or better is AWS Device farm in usage and how advantageous it would be for us to use it over other mentioned tools

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Replies (3)
Aaron Evans
Testing Strategist at One Shore · | 3 upvotes · 5.8K views

A SaaS offering like Sauce Labs (or BrowserStack or LambdaTest, etc) will provide a remote Selenium/Appium Grid including the ability to run test automation in parallel (up to the amount based your subscription level) an a wide array of browsers and mobile devices.

These tools can be expensive, but if you can afford them, the expertise and effort of maintaining the grid, browser updates, etc. is worth it.

AWS Device Farm can be significantly cheaper, but is much more work to setup and run. It will not give you as many devices, or the reporting and screen/video capture you get with the the services. And there is no support for AWS Device Farm, and very poor documentation. I have used it, but do not recommend it. Running your own grid and physical device lab is better, but I'd stick with a service like Sauce Labs or Perfecto which will save you time and give you better services despite the higher price tag.

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Recommends
on
BrowserStackBrowserStack

Stability - Just works. Availability - More than 15 datacenters. Enterprise features like SSO, local testing and SOC2/GDPR compliant.

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Jaymie Falconi
Recommends
on
BitBarBitBar

BitBar's Dedicated Devices would be a great option for you. It allows you to dedicate (reserve) devices for your use only which also having access to all of the devices in the shared cloud. BitBar has the features and integrations that you are looking for as well.

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Decisions about BrowserStack and GitLab
Weverton Timoteo

Do you review your Pull/Merge Request before assigning Reviewers?

If you work in a team opening a Pull Request (or Merge Request) looks appropriate. However, have you ever thought about opening a Pull/Merge Request when working by yourself? Here's a checklist of things you can review in your own:

  • Pick the correct target branch
  • Make Drafts explicit
  • Name things properly
  • Ask help for tools
  • Remove the noise
  • Fetch necessary data
  • Understand Mergeability
  • Pass the message
  • Add screenshots
  • Be found in the future
  • Comment inline in your changes

Read the blog post for more detailed explanation for each item :D

What else do you review before asking for code review?

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Weverton Timoteo

Using an inclusive language is crucial for fostering a diverse culture. Git has changed the naming conventions to be more language-inclusive, and so you should change. Our development tools, like GitHub and GitLab, already supports the change.

SourceLevel deals very nicely with repositories that changed the master branch to a more appropriate word. Besides, you can use the grep linter the look for exclusive terms contained in the source code.

As the inclusive language gap may happen in other aspects of our lives, have you already thought about them?

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Weverton Timoteo

One of the magic tricks git performs is the ability to rewrite log history. You can do it in many ways, but git rebase -i is the one I most use. With this command, It’s possible to switch commits order, remove a commit, squash two or more commits, or edit, for instance.

It’s particularly useful to run it before opening a pull request. It allows developers to “clean up” the mess and organize commits before submitting to review. If you follow the practice 3 and 4, then the list of commits should look very similar to a task list. It should reveal the rationale you had, telling the story of how you end up with that final code.

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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 8 upvotes · 648.3K views

Out of most of the VCS solutions out there, we found Gitlab was the most feature complete with a free community edition. Their DevSecops offering is also a very robust solution. Gitlab CI/CD was quite easy to setup and the direct integration with your VCS + CI/CD is also a bonus. Out of the box integration with major cloud providers, alerting through instant messages etc. are all extremely convenient. We push our CI/CD updates to MS Teams.

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Gitlab as A LOT of features that GitHub and Azure DevOps are missing. Even if both GH and Azure are backed by Microsoft, GitLab being open source has a faster upgrade rate and the hosted by gitlab.com solution seems more appealing than anything else! Quick win: the UI is way better and the Pipeline is way easier to setup on GitLab!

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Nazar Atamaniuk
Shared insights
on
DeployPlaceDeployPlaceGitHubGitHubGitLabGitLab

At DeployPlace we use self-hosted GitLab, we have chosen GitLab as most of us are familiar with it. We are happy with all features GitLab provides, I can’t imagine our life without integrated GitLab CI. Another important feature for us is integrated code review tool, we use it every day, we use merge requests, code reviews, branching. To be honest, most of us have GitHub accounts as well, we like to contribute in open source, and we want to be a part of the tech community, but lack of solutions from GitHub in the area of CI doesn’t let us chose it for our projects.

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Pros of BrowserStack
Pros of GitLab
  • 134
    Multiple browsers
  • 75
    Ease of use
  • 63
    Real browsers
  • 43
    Ability to use it locally
  • 26
    Good price
  • 20
    Great web interface
  • 18
    IE support
  • 16
    Official mobile emulators
  • 14
    Instant access
  • 14
    Cloud-based access
  • 11
    Real mobile devices
  • 7
    Selenium compatible
  • 7
    Screenshots
  • 7
    Multiple Desktop OS
  • 6
    Can be used for Testing and E2E
  • 5
    Pre-installed developer tools
  • 4
    Video of test runs
  • 3
    Webdriver compatible
  • 3
    Many browsers
  • 3
    Supports Manual, Functional and Visual Diff Testing
  • 3
    Favourites
  • 2
    Cypress Compatible
  • 2
    Test automation dashboard
  • 2
    Unify and track test cases
  • 2
    Free for Open Source
  • 2
    Test Management
  • 2
    Cross-browser testing
  • 2
    Bi-directional Jira Sync
  • 1
    Speed is fast
  • 1
    Real devices
  • 0
    Web accessibility
  • 0
    Test WCAG Compliance
  • 0
    Visual testing and review
  • 507
    Self hosted
  • 429
    Free
  • 339
    Has community edition
  • 242
    Easy setup
  • 240
    Familiar interface
  • 137
    Includes many features, including ci
  • 113
    Nice UI
  • 84
    Good integration with gitlabci
  • 57
    Simple setup
  • 34
    Free private repository
  • 34
    Has an official mobile app
  • 31
    Continuous Integration
  • 22
    Open source, great ui (like github)
  • 18
    Slack Integration
  • 14
    Full CI flow
  • 11
    Free and unlimited private git repos
  • 10
    User, group, and project access management is simple
  • 9
    All in one (Git, CI, Agile..)
  • 8
    Built-in CI
  • 8
    Intuitive UI
  • 6
    Full DevOps suite with Git
  • 6
    Both public and private Repositories
  • 5
    Integrated Docker Registry
  • 5
    Build/pipeline definition alongside code
  • 5
    So easy to use
  • 5
    CI
  • 5
    It's powerful source code management tool
  • 4
    Unlimited free repos & collaborators
  • 4
    Security and Stable
  • 4
    On-premises
  • 4
    It's fully integrated
  • 4
    Excellent
  • 4
    Issue system
  • 4
    Mattermost Chat client
  • 4
    Dockerized
  • 3
    Great for team collaboration
  • 3
    Free private repos
  • 3
    Because is the best remote host for git repositories
  • 3
    Low maintenance cost due omnibus-deployment
  • 3
    Not Microsoft Owned
  • 3
    Built-in Docker Registry
  • 3
    Opensource
  • 3
    I like the its runners and executors feature
  • 2
    Multilingual interface
  • 2
    Powerful software planning and maintaining tools
  • 2
    Review Apps feature
  • 2
    Kubernetes integration with GitLab CI
  • 2
    One-click install through DigitalOcean
  • 2
    Powerful Continuous Integration System
  • 2
    Native CI
  • 2
    HipChat intergration
  • 2
    Many private repo
  • 2
    Kubernetes Integration
  • 2
    Published IP list for whitelisting (gl-infra#434)
  • 2
    Wounderful
  • 2
    Beautiful
  • 2
    Groups of groups
  • 2
    The dashboard with deployed environments
  • 2
    It includes everything I need, all packaged with docker
  • 1
    Supports Radius/Ldap & Browser Code Edits

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Cons of BrowserStack
Cons of GitLab
  • 2
    Very limited choice of minor versions
  • 28
    Slow ui performance
  • 8
    Introduce breaking bugs every release
  • 6
    Insecure (no published IP list for whitelisting)
  • 2
    Built-in Docker Registry
  • 1
    Review Apps feature

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

What is BrowserStack?

BrowserStack is the leading test platform built for developers & QAs to expand test coverage, scale & optimize testing with cross-browser, real device cloud, accessibility, visual testing, test management, and test observability.

What is GitLab?

GitLab offers git repository management, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds and wikis. Enterprises install GitLab on-premise and connect it with LDAP and Active Directory servers for secure authentication and authorization. A single GitLab server can handle more than 25,000 users but it is also possible to create a high availability setup with multiple active servers.

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What companies use BrowserStack?
What companies use GitLab?
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Blog Posts

What are some alternatives to BrowserStack and GitLab?
Browserling
We run the browsers on our servers. Fully interactive sessions, not static screenshots. No flash, no applets, nothing to install. Powered entirely by <canvas> and javascript.
LambdaTest
LambdaTest platform provides secure, scalable and insightful test orchestration for website, and mobile app testing. Customers at different points in their DevOps lifecycle can leverage Automation and/or Manual testing on LambdaTest.
Ghost Inspector
It lets you create and manage UI tests that check specific functionality in your website or application. We execute these automated browser tests continuously from the cloud and alert you if anything breaks.
AWS Device Farm
Run tests across a large selection of physical devices in parallel from various manufacturers with varying hardware, OS versions and form factors.
Appium
Appium is an open source test automation framework for use with native, hybrid, and mobile web apps. It drives iOS and Android apps using the WebDriver protocol. Appium is sponsored by Sauce Labs and a thriving community of open source developers.
See all alternatives