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GitHub vs GitLab vs Perforce: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this article, we will discuss the key differences between GitHub, GitLab, and Perforce. These platforms are commonly used for version control and collaboration in software development projects.
- Code Hosting and Collaboration:
- *GitHub* is primarily a web-based hosting service for Git repositories. It offers a user-friendly interface, powerful collaboration features, and a large community of developers. It provides project management tools like issue tracking, wikis, and code review features.
- *GitLab* is a similar web-based Git repository manager with collaboration features. It offers additional tools for continuous integration and deployment, making it a complete DevOps platform. GitLab can be self-hosted or used as a cloud-based service.
- *Perforce* is a centralized version control system that's been around for a long time. It focuses on scalability, performance, and security, especially for large codebases. Perforce emphasizes fine-grained access control and branching strategies.
- Pricing and Deployment Options:
- *GitHub* offers both free and paid plans. Free accounts have limitations on private repositories and collaboration features. Paid plans provide additional functionality like advanced security features and unlimited private repositories. GitHub is cloud-based and does not require self-hosting.
- *GitLab* offers a free community edition for self-hosting, as well as a cloud-based service with different pricing tiers. The self-hosted edition gives more control over data privacy and customization. GitLab also provides a free tier for individuals and small teams, similar to GitHub.
- *Perforce* offers various pricing tiers based on the number of users and required features. It can be self-hosted on-premises, in a private cloud, or used as a cloud-based service. Perforce provides professional support and consultation for enterprise customers.
- Integrated CI/CD pipelines:
- *GitHub* has its own CI/CD platform called GitHub Actions. It allows developers to define and automate workflows for building, testing, and deploying their applications. GitHub Actions is tightly integrated with the GitHub ecosystem and can be extended using custom actions.
- *GitLab* includes built-in Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) features. It provides a comprehensive CI/CD pipeline editor that supports multiple stages and parallel execution of jobs. GitLab's CI/CD platform also supports Docker containerization, making it easy to deploy applications.
- *Perforce* does not have native CI/CD features. However, it integrates with popular CI/CD tools like Jenkins and TeamCity, allowing users to orchestrate build and deployment pipelines alongside their Perforce version control system.
- Community and Open Source Collaboration:
- *GitHub* has a large and active community of developers. It is widely used for hosting open source projects and encourages collaboration among developers. GitHub allows anyone to contribute to open source projects by submitting pull requests and participating in discussions.
- *GitLab* also has a vibrant community and supports open source collaboration. GitLab's open source edition provides a platform for hosting and contributing to open source projects. It encourages transparency and collaboration by offering features like public repositories and issue boards.
- *Perforce* is more commonly used in commercial and enterprise settings. While it can be used for open source projects, it doesn't have the same level of community and collaboration features as GitHub and GitLab. Perforce primarily caters to organizations with complex version control needs.
- Security and Access Control:
- *GitHub* provides various security features like two-factor authentication, vulnerability scanning, and automated security alerts. It also has granular access control options for repository management, allowing organizations to set fine-grained permissions for different users and teams.
- *GitLab* emphasizes security and provides features like two-factor authentication, security scanning, and container image vulnerability scanning. GitLab also offers advanced access control with flexible permission settings, groups, and roles to manage user access to repositories and projects.
- *Perforce* is known for its robust security measures. It offers comprehensive access control capabilities, including role-based access, fine-grained permissions, and LDAP integration. Perforce provides encryption of data in transit and at rest, making it suitable for organizations with high-security requirements.
- Scalability and Performance:
- *GitHub* is highly scalable and can handle a large number of users and repositories. It has a strong infrastructure and CDN support for faster delivery of static assets. However, certain actions like repository clones or large file uploads may encounter performance limitations.
- *GitLab* is designed to be scalable but may require additional resources for larger installations. GitLab provides guidance on hardware requirements and offers options for horizontal scaling by using multiple application and database servers. GitLab also allows caching of static assets to improve performance.
- *Perforce* has a reputation for being highly scalable and performs well with large codebases. It uses a central server architecture optimized for speed and efficiency. Perforce can handle large binary files efficiently and offers advanced features like server-side file indexing for fast search operations.
In summary, GitHub and GitLab are both Git-based code hosting and collaboration platforms, but GitLab provides additional DevOps capabilities and can be self-hosted. Perforce, on the other hand, is a centralized version control system focused on scalability and security for enterprise-level use.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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/
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.
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.
GitHub is trying to catch up with GitLab. GitLab was built from the ground up with DevOps tooling. GitHub is years away on features.
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.
- Is it a good idea to migrate from Bitbucket to AWS Codecommit?
- 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Pros of GitHub
- Open source friendly1.8K
- Easy source control1.5K
- Nice UI1.3K
- Great for team collaboration1.1K
- Easy setup868
- Issue tracker504
- Great community487
- Remote team collaboration483
- Great way to share449
- Pull request and features planning442
- Just works147
- Integrated in many tools132
- Free Public Repos122
- Github Gists116
- Github pages113
- Easy to find repos83
- Open source62
- Easy to find projects60
- It's free60
- Network effect56
- Extensive API49
- Organizations43
- Branching42
- Developer Profiles34
- Git Powered Wikis32
- Great for collaboration30
- It's fun24
- Clean interface and good integrations23
- Community SDK involvement22
- Learn from others source code20
- Because: Git16
- It integrates directly with Azure14
- Standard in Open Source collab10
- Newsfeed10
- Fast8
- Beautiful user experience8
- It integrates directly with Hipchat8
- Easy to discover new code libraries7
- It's awesome6
- Smooth integration6
- Cloud SCM6
- Nice API6
- Graphs6
- Integrations6
- Hands down best online Git service available5
- Reliable5
- Quick Onboarding5
- CI Integration5
- Remarkable uptime5
- Security options4
- Loved by developers4
- Uses GIT4
- Free HTML hosting4
- Easy to use and collaborate with others4
- Version Control4
- Simple but powerful4
- Unlimited Public Repos at no cost4
- Nice to use3
- IAM3
- Ci3
- Easy deployment via SSH3
- Free private repos2
- Good tools support2
- All in one development service2
- Never dethroned2
- Easy source control and everything is backed up2
- Issues tracker2
- Self Hosted2
- IAM integration2
- Very Easy to Use2
- Easy to use2
- Leads the copycats2
- Free HTML hostings2
- Easy and efficient maintainance of the projects2
- Beautiful2
- Dasf1
- Profound1
Pros of GitLab
- Self hosted508
- Free431
- Has community edition339
- Easy setup242
- Familiar interface240
- Includes many features, including ci137
- Nice UI113
- Good integration with gitlabci84
- Simple setup57
- Has an official mobile app35
- Free private repository34
- Continuous Integration31
- Open source, great ui (like github)23
- Slack Integration18
- Full CI flow15
- Free and unlimited private git repos11
- All in one (Git, CI, Agile..)10
- User, group, and project access management is simple10
- Intuitive UI8
- Built-in CI8
- Full DevOps suite with Git6
- Both public and private Repositories6
- Integrated Docker Registry5
- So easy to use5
- CI5
- Build/pipeline definition alongside code5
- It's powerful source code management tool5
- Dockerized4
- It's fully integrated4
- On-premises4
- Security and Stable4
- Unlimited free repos & collaborators4
- Not Microsoft Owned4
- Excellent4
- Issue system4
- Mattermost Chat client4
- Great for team collaboration3
- Free private repos3
- Because is the best remote host for git repositories3
- Built-in Docker Registry3
- Opensource3
- Low maintenance cost due omnibus-deployment3
- I like the its runners and executors feature3
- Beautiful2
- Groups of groups2
- Multilingual interface2
- Powerful software planning and maintaining tools2
- Review Apps feature2
- Kubernetes integration with GitLab CI2
- One-click install through DigitalOcean2
- Powerful Continuous Integration System2
- It includes everything I need, all packaged with docker2
- The dashboard with deployed environments2
- HipChat intergration2
- Many private repo2
- Kubernetes Integration2
- Published IP list for whitelisting (gl-infra#434)2
- Wounderful2
- Native CI2
- Supports Radius/Ldap & Browser Code Edits1
Pros of Perforce
- Powerful3
- Great for Enterprise level use3
- Robust2
- Scalable1
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Cons of GitHub
- Owned by micrcosoft55
- Expensive for lone developers that want private repos38
- Relatively slow product/feature release cadence15
- API scoping could be better10
- Only 3 collaborators for private repos9
- Limited featureset for issue management4
- Does not have a graph for showing history like git lens3
- GitHub Packages does not support SNAPSHOT versions2
- No multilingual interface1
- Takes a long time to commit1
- Expensive1
Cons of GitLab
- Slow ui performance28
- Introduce breaking bugs every release9
- Insecure (no published IP list for whitelisting)6
- Built-in Docker Registry2
- Review Apps feature1