GitHubย vsย GitLabย vsย Gitolite

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

GitHub

286.1K
249.8K
+ 1
10.3K
GitLab

61.9K
53.1K
+ 1
2.5K
Gitolite

39
87
+ 1
12

GitHub vs GitLab vs Gitolite: What are the differences?

Key differences between GitHub, GitLab, and Gitolite

  1. Hosting Service vs. Self-Hosted: GitHub is a cloud-based hosting service for version control using Git, while GitLab can be used both as a cloud-based service or self-hosted on-premise. On the other hand, Gitolite is a tool specifically designed for self-hosted Git servers. Each platform offers varying degrees of control over the infrastructure.

  2. Collaboration Features: GitHub is known for its strong emphasis on social coding and collaboration, with features like pull requests, issue tracking, project boards, and more. GitLab offers similar collaboration features as GitHub but allows for deeper integration with other tools through its extensive CI/CD pipelines. Gitolite, on the other hand, focuses more on access control and permissions management within the Git server.

  3. Pricing and Licensing: GitHub has premium plans for private repositories while offering public repositories for free. GitLab, on the other hand, offers a Community Edition that is open-source and free to use, along with Enterprise Editions with additional features. Gitolite is completely free and open-source, making it a cost-effective option for managing Git repositories.

  4. Customization and Extensibility: GitLab provides a high level of customization with the ability to modify the source code and add custom extensions. GitHub also allows some customization through integrations with third-party tools. Gitolite offers extensive customization options, allowing administrators to define access control rules using a configuration file.

  5. Scalability and Performance: GitHub is known for its reliability and scalability to handle large projects and repositories efficiently. GitLab, especially the self-hosted version, provides flexibility in scaling resources based on the organization's needs. Gitolite, being designed for small to medium-sized Git server instances, may lack the scalability features of GitHub and GitLab.

  6. Community and Support: GitHub has a large and active community of developers, making it a popular choice for open-source projects. GitLab also has a growing community but with strong support for enterprise organizations. Gitolite, being more niche, may have a smaller community but offers dedicated support for its users.

In Summary, the key differences among GitHub, GitLab, and Gitolite lie in their hosting options, collaboration features, pricing models, customization abilities, scalability, and community support.

Advice on GitHub, GitLab, and Gitolite
Needs advice
on
GitGitGitHubGitHub
and
GitLabGitLab

Which one of these should I install? I am a beginner and starting to learn to code. I have Anaconda, Visual Studio Code ( vscode recommended me to install Git) and I am learning Python, JavaScript, and MySQL for educational purposes. Also if you have any other pro-tips or advice for me please share.

Yours thankfully, Darkhiem

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Replies (5)
Christopher Wray
Web Developer at Soltech LLC ยท | 18 upvotes ยท 243.5K views
Recommends
on
GitGitGitHubGitHub

Hey there, Definitely install Git. Git is the open source version control system that both GitHub and GitLab interface with. Git is extremely important as a new developer to learn, and once you do, you will be so thankful you are tracking your projects in it. Git makes it super easy to track changes you make in your code, and even rollback, edit, view, or delete changes you made months before. In software development, it is a crucial skill to learn.

GitHub and GitLab are online cloud Git repositories. They are for backing up your repos in the cloud, and working with other developers, or even working with yourself via other devices. I would recommend starting with GitHub since you are a new developer. Companies will want to see your GitHub when you start applying to jobs, and having one will be a great plus going for you. It also is the most widely used by developers and most open source projects are hosted on GitHub.

Here is a course on Codecademy to start learning: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-git

Hope this helps! Good luck!

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Recommends
on
GitHubGitHub

I think Github is the most important thing, so take good care of it, and share your most important programs on it with others, this helps to raise your efficiency through the feedback of others. with my Greetings.

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Pat Fitzner
Recommends
on
GitGit

Hey! Regardless of your choice of platform, you will need to install and learn Git. So start there! The differences between GitHub and GitLab are not relevant to you at this stage.

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Recommends
on
GitHubGitHub

I use GitHub by few years. For now, I think this is the best way to work on another computers or to work with other people. I tested GitLab and Git, but for me GitHub is easier and most friendly for another developers who are worked with me.

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Joon Poore
Full Stack Web Dev. at Quary.dk ยท | 1 upvotes ยท 163.8K views

For python, Pycharm is a very nice and beginner friendly IDE. I am using it myself, use the free community edition, it also comes with a lot of great tools.

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Matanel Crown
Software Developer at BBT.live ยท | 7 upvotes ยท 318.8K views

Hi all,

I would like some information regarding the benefits an aspiring start-up company may have, while using GitHub Enterprise vs the regular GitHub package. On a separate issue, I'd like to understand whether GitLab may have some DevOps-related advantages GitHub does not.

Thank you in advance, Matt

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Replies (5)
Luke Carr
Founder & CEO at Moducate ยท | 7 upvotes ยท 260.1K views

I'd lean towards GitHub (either billing plan) for one key reason that is often overlooked (we certainly did!).

If you're planning on creating OSS repositories under your start-up's name/brand, people will naturally expect to find the public repositories on GitHub. Not on GitLab, or Bitbucket, or a self-hosted Gitea, but on GitHub.

Personally, I find it simpler to have all of the repositories (public and private) under one organisation and on one platform, so for this reason, I think that GitHub is the best choice.

On the DevOps side, GitLab is far superior to GitHub (from my experience using both GitHub Enterprise and GitLab Ultimate), but for the one aforementioned, we're using GitHub at Moducate.

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Recommends
on
GitLabGitLab

Advantages for Github Enterprise is that you get more storage, CI minutes, advanced security features, and premium support. If you don't really need any of those, you can stick with Github Team. Though if you're going to use Gitlab CI, I suggest going with Gitlab instead of Github so you won't have to maintain 2 repositories.

Regarding the advantages that Gitlab CI has over Github, there's a detailed explanation here: https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/ci-missing-github-capabilities/

If you need more minutes for Gitlab CI, you can always use your own Gitlab CI runners instead of the shared runners: https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/register/

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Brandon Miller
Recommends
on
GitHub EnterpriseGitHub Enterprise

With the advent of Gitlab actions/workflows, it's hard to not choose Github anymore. I say that with all love for Gitlab, as it's been my personal tool of choice for a long time because of it's inbuilt CI/CD solutions. Github is just all around more adopted by the community so you'll always find more support; and if you go with enterprise you will get 50k build minutes a month as well as a ton of extra tools that will definitely help a startup out from the get-go. That being said, it's priced at $21 per user, per month so if you cannot afford that, I say go with Github.

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Evgeny Rahman
Full Stack Solution Architect ยท | 3 upvotes ยท 224.3K views
Recommends

GitHub Enterprise comes with included SAML SSO support, and a huge free tier for Actions and Packages, which gives your team everything they need to get off to a great start and scale up without hitting any roadblocks along the way. An important point to consider is that GitHub Enterprise comes in both self-hosted and cloud-hosted variations, so you don't need to manage your own infrastructure for it unless you would prefer to.

With GitHub Enterprise, you also plug in to the largest development community in the world, and can collaborate directly on the open source projects that are probably already part of your stack. You can also access the latest and greatest in development tools such as GitHub Codespaces, GitHub Co-Pilot, and much much more, with great new features being shipped every day.

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Recommends
on
GitLabGitLab

GitHub is trying to catch up with GitLab. GitLab was built from the ground up with DevOps tooling. GitHub is years away on features.

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Hi, I need advice. In my project, we are using Bitbucket hosted on-prem, Jenkins, and Jira. Also, we have restrictions not to use any plugins for code review, code quality, code security, etc., with bitbucket. Now we want to migrate to AWS CodeCommit, which would mean that we can use, let's say, Amazon CodeGuru for code reviews and move to AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodePipeline for build automation in the future rather than using Jenkins.

Now I want advice on below.

  1. Is it a good idea to migrate from Bitbucket to AWS Codecommit?
  2. If we want to integrate Jira with AWS Codecommit, then how can we do this? If a developer makes any changes in Jira, then a build should be triggered automatically in AWS and create a Jira ticket if the build fails. So, how can we achieve this?
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Replies (1)
Sinisha Mihajlovski
Design Lead | Senior Software Developer ยท | 1 upvotes ยท 362.6K views
Recommends

Hi Kavita. It would be useful to explain in a bit more detail the integration to Jira you would like to achieve. Some of the Jira plugins will work with any git repository, regardless if its github/bitbucket/gitlab.

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Decisions about GitHub, GitLab, and Gitolite
Benjamin Stirrup

We chose github + github actions in order to manage the code versioning and the CI on the same software. Furthermore, while it is not that much, I believe that for a large team it is considerably cheaper to have one github subscription instead of a git subscription and a CI/CD software subscription.

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Hendrik Halkow

GitHub provides great user experience ans most developers are familiar with it. There is also an attractive pricing model for those who already have a Visual Studio subscription.

We also don't like the "everything in one tool" approach from GitHub as there are better tools for build system, package registries, etc. on the market.

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We chose GitHub for version control hosting because of its high-quality and performant pull request user interface, as well as GitHub Actions.

We also selected GitHub as our first OAuth2 authorization provider because of its large community, high-quality documentation, and sophisticated App framework for granular permission management and event notifications.

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Steve Barnes
Lead Software Tools Engineer at Leonardo UK ยท | 7 upvotes ยท 242.2K views

The company needed to move from hosting all of our repositories, tickets & releases from a GForge instance hosted by our former parent company. The decision was made to move to GitHub Enterprise but the developers were not told until there was 1 month left to go. So needed something that could pull all of our information out and push it to the new hosts and it needed to be done ASAP.

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Eduardo Fernandez
Software Engineer at Parrot Software, Inc. ยท | 8 upvotes ยท 281K views

Do you have a K8s cluster and you want to deploy some services to it? Gitlab Auto Devops is key to achieve this without breaking a sweat.

We deploy Go services to our K8S clusters with warp speed thanks to Gitlab and it's Auto Devops pipeline.

I haven't seen tooling like this in any other git cloud provider.

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Phillip Manwaring
Developer at Coach Align ยท | 17 upvotes ยท 390.8K views

Both of us are far more familiar with GitHub than Gitlab, and so for our first big project together decided to go with what we know here instead of figuring out something new (there are so many new things we need to figure out, might as well reduce the number of optionally new things, lol). We aren't currently taking advantage of GitHub Actions or very many other built-in features (besides Dependabot) but luckily it integrates very well with the other services we're using.

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Elmar Wouters
CEO, Managing Director at Wouters Media ยท | 7 upvotes ยท 559.1K views

I first used BitBucket because it had private repo's, and it didn't disappoint me. Also with the smooth integration of Jira, the decision to use BitBucket as a full application maintenance service was as easy as 1, 2, 3.

I honestly love BitBucket, by the looks, by the UI, and the smooth integration with Tower.

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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, Itโ€™s possible to switch commits order, remove a commit, squash two or more commits, or edit, for instance.

Itโ€™s particularly useful to run it before opening a pull request. It allows developers to โ€œclean upโ€ 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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Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
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Pros of GitHub
Pros of GitLab
Pros of Gitolite
  • 1.8K
    Open source friendly
  • 1.5K
    Easy source control
  • 1.3K
    Nice UI
  • 1.1K
    Great for team collaboration
  • 867
    Easy setup
  • 504
    Issue tracker
  • 487
    Great community
  • 483
    Remote team collaboration
  • 449
    Great way to share
  • 442
    Pull request and features planning
  • 147
    Just works
  • 132
    Integrated in many tools
  • 122
    Free Public Repos
  • 116
    Github Gists
  • 113
    Github pages
  • 83
    Easy to find repos
  • 62
    Open source
  • 60
    Easy to find projects
  • 60
    It's free
  • 56
    Network effect
  • 49
    Extensive API
  • 43
    Organizations
  • 42
    Branching
  • 34
    Developer Profiles
  • 32
    Git Powered Wikis
  • 30
    Great for collaboration
  • 24
    It's fun
  • 23
    Clean interface and good integrations
  • 22
    Community SDK involvement
  • 20
    Learn from others source code
  • 16
    Because: Git
  • 14
    It integrates directly with Azure
  • 10
    Standard in Open Source collab
  • 10
    Newsfeed
  • 8
    Fast
  • 8
    Beautiful user experience
  • 8
    It integrates directly with Hipchat
  • 7
    Easy to discover new code libraries
  • 6
    Smooth integration
  • 6
    Integrations
  • 6
    Graphs
  • 6
    Nice API
  • 6
    It's awesome
  • 6
    Cloud SCM
  • 5
    Quick Onboarding
  • 5
    Remarkable uptime
  • 5
    CI Integration
  • 5
    Reliable
  • 5
    Hands down best online Git service available
  • 4
    Version Control
  • 4
    Unlimited Public Repos at no cost
  • 4
    Simple but powerful
  • 4
    Loved by developers
  • 4
    Free HTML hosting
  • 4
    Uses GIT
  • 4
    Security options
  • 4
    Easy to use and collaborate with others
  • 3
    Easy deployment via SSH
  • 3
    Ci
  • 3
    IAM
  • 3
    Nice to use
  • 2
    Easy and efficient maintainance of the projects
  • 2
    Beautiful
  • 2
    Self Hosted
  • 2
    Issues tracker
  • 2
    Easy source control and everything is backed up
  • 2
    Never dethroned
  • 2
    All in one development service
  • 2
    Good tools support
  • 2
    Free HTML hostings
  • 2
    IAM integration
  • 2
    Very Easy to Use
  • 2
    Easy to use
  • 2
    Leads the copycats
  • 2
    Free private repos
  • 1
    Profound
  • 1
    Dasf
  • 508
    Self hosted
  • 431
    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
  • 35
    Has an official mobile app
  • 34
    Free private repository
  • 31
    Continuous Integration
  • 23
    Open source, great ui (like github)
  • 18
    Slack Integration
  • 15
    Full CI flow
  • 11
    Free and unlimited private git repos
  • 10
    All in one (Git, CI, Agile..)
  • 10
    User, group, and project access management is simple
  • 8
    Intuitive UI
  • 8
    Built-in CI
  • 6
    Full DevOps suite with Git
  • 6
    Both public and private Repositories
  • 5
    Integrated Docker Registry
  • 5
    So easy to use
  • 5
    CI
  • 5
    Build/pipeline definition alongside code
  • 5
    It's powerful source code management tool
  • 4
    Dockerized
  • 4
    It's fully integrated
  • 4
    On-premises
  • 4
    Security and Stable
  • 4
    Unlimited free repos & collaborators
  • 4
    Not Microsoft Owned
  • 4
    Excellent
  • 4
    Issue system
  • 4
    Mattermost Chat client
  • 3
    Great for team collaboration
  • 3
    Free private repos
  • 3
    Because is the best remote host for git repositories
  • 3
    Built-in Docker Registry
  • 3
    Opensource
  • 3
    Low maintenance cost due omnibus-deployment
  • 3
    I like the its runners and executors feature
  • 2
    Beautiful
  • 2
    Groups of groups
  • 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
    It includes everything I need, all packaged with docker
  • 2
    The dashboard with deployed environments
  • 2
    HipChat intergration
  • 2
    Many private repo
  • 2
    Kubernetes Integration
  • 2
    Published IP list for whitelisting (gl-infra#434)
  • 2
    Wounderful
  • 2
    Native CI
  • 1
    Supports Radius/Ldap & Browser Code Edits
  • 5
    Easy setup
  • 4
    Fine-tuned per-branch permissions
  • 1
    Really easy setup
  • 1
    Free
  • 1
    Free multi-server mirroring

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Cons of GitHub
Cons of GitLab
Cons of Gitolite
  • 55
    Owned by micrcosoft
  • 38
    Expensive for lone developers that want private repos
  • 15
    Relatively slow product/feature release cadence
  • 10
    API scoping could be better
  • 9
    Only 3 collaborators for private repos
  • 4
    Limited featureset for issue management
  • 3
    Does not have a graph for showing history like git lens
  • 2
    GitHub Packages does not support SNAPSHOT versions
  • 1
    No multilingual interface
  • 1
    Takes a long time to commit
  • 1
    Expensive
  • 28
    Slow ui performance
  • 9
    Introduce breaking bugs every release
  • 6
    Insecure (no published IP list for whitelisting)
  • 2
    Built-in Docker Registry
  • 1
    Review Apps feature
  • 1
    Antiquated
  • 1
    Doesn't have any user interface
  • 1
    No tools for project and issue tracker

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- No public GitHub repository available -

What is GitHub?

GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.

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.

What is Gitolite?

Gitolite allows you to setup git hosting on a central server, with fine-grained access control and many more powerful features. Gitolite is an access control layer on top of git.

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What are some alternatives to GitHub, GitLab, and Gitolite?
Bitbucket
Bitbucket gives teams one place to plan projects, collaborate on code, test and deploy, all with free private Git repositories. Teams choose Bitbucket because it has a superior Jira integration, built-in CI/CD, & is free for up to 5 users.
AWS CodeCommit
CodeCommit eliminates the need to operate your own source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure. You can use CodeCommit to securely store anything from source code to binaries, and it works seamlessly with your existing Git tools.
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
SVN (Subversion)
Subversion exists to be universally recognized and adopted as an open-source, centralized version control system characterized by its reliability as a safe haven for valuable data; the simplicity of its model and usage; and its ability to support the needs of a wide variety of users and projects, from individuals to large-scale enterprise operations.
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps provides unlimited private Git hosting, cloud build for continuous integration, agile planning, and release management for continuous delivery to the cloud and on-premises. Includes broad IDE support.
See all alternatives