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GitHub vs GitLab: What are the differences?
GitHub and GitLab are both popular platforms for version control and collaboration. Here are the key differences between GitHub and GitLab:
Hosting and Deployment: GitHub is primarily a cloud-based platform that offers hosting for Git repositories. It provides a fully managed service, where users can create and manage their repositories directly on GitHub's servers. GitLab, on the other hand, offers both a cloud-based SaaS solution (GitLab.com) and a self-hosted solution (GitLab Community Edition). This means that users have the flexibility to choose between hosting their repositories on GitLab's cloud platform or deploying GitLab on their own infrastructure.
Pricing and Licensing: GitHub provides free options for public repositories and paid plans for private repositories, while GitLab offers a free Community Edition and a paid Enterprise Edition.
Feature Set: GitHub is known for its robust integration ecosystem, which includes a wide range of third-party tools and services for continuous integration, deployment, and project management. GitLab, on the other hand, aims to provide a more comprehensive DevOps platform with built-in features like CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes integration, and a built-in Docker container registry.
Community and Collaboration: GitHub has a large and active community of developers, making it a popular platform for open-source projects. It offers features that facilitate collaboration and contribution, such as pull requests, code reviews, and issue tracking. GitLab also has a growing community, and its open-source nature encourages collaboration. Additionally, GitLab emphasizes the concept of "GitLab Flow," which promotes a more integrated and streamlined workflow for development, collaboration, and deployment. This includes features like integrated CI/CD pipelines and a consolidated interface for managing code, issues, and project management.
In summary, GitHub is a widely-used platform for hosting and collaborating on code, particularly for open-source projects, with a large developer community and robust collaboration features. While GitLab, also popular for code hosting, offers an open-source Community Edition for self-hosting or use on GitLab.com, along with an Enterprise Edition with additional features and support.
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.
A long while ago, GitLab was one of the best git servers with a lot of advanced capabilities, and they grew the feature set ever since. Back in the day, GitLab provided unlimited users compared to 3 users limit in GitHub. For us, this was a life saver, as we are working as part-time organization, which contains both developers and non-developers, at our best, we reached 15 users, spanning over product, web, mobile and other services. So, instead of having the 15 users in GitHub with full price of users for half of us coding, and working like 3 hours a day tops, and 5 days a week, this was an overkill. So, GitLab was the best one to choose at that time.
When Microsoft acquired GitHub, I was skeptical, I though they will ruin the platform (to some degree), and for a while there was no noticeable difference. Well, until they made the service free by lifting the 3-user limit. It did not effect us for a while, as we were using GitLab extensively. Our usages was mainly version control and nothing else, one time for one project, we tried to set up a CI\CD, our first one ever. Even thought we discarded that thought, it was a good experience. We heavily relay on version-control-based features, like forking and branching, tags and milestones, and pull/merge requests but nothing fancy.
When the bad time stormed us for the first time, when GitLab first announced the price change and the 5-user limit per namespace, we planned our migration to GitHub, it was in a critical time, and the situation was dire. So, we decided to breakdown the teams, we were like 8~10 members at that time, and so, we broke the team into 3 smaller teams. One for frontend web, one for backend, and one for mobile. We had 2 people in common in all 3 for redundancy and availability, as we are using other services that require some people to handle the integrations and usages of the other platforms, namely Netlify, CloudFlare, and Laravel Forge. So it worked out well, despite the quick changes.
When another round of price increase came, it killed GitLab in my eyes. The one who stood for open source and challenged GitHub at sometime, is now only seeking revenue at all costs. It does not effect us in any other way apart from splitting the team into 5-or-less members in a namespace, so it does not bring any new damage to us. But morally, we started to favor GitHub over self-hosted GitLab, as we don't know how bad will GitLab turn. In the first round, the price was way too high, with the second, it was just an overkill. So, I thinking GitLab is seeking its death by its own hands, and we will probably jump ships to GitHub or any suitable service when the times comes.
I use GitHub as my primary code hosting, collaboration and CI/CD platform, as well as for my portfolio.
The reasons against GitHub:
- No fine-grained Permissions possible. Write-only for whole repo only. The fuck?. Not only will this potentially end in a disaster, it already ended up causing the necessity for every big multi-maintainer project to have an maybe-even-own-written GitHub App that allows specified users to do a specified set of things by posting comments that are structured as commands.
- GitHub Packages Size Limit
- [Addendum 2022/07] GitHub Actions is great in general, but it lacks some features in the long run / when you want to get more advanced. (e.g. early-exiting the job, getting the job or workflow id in a job, job-level if's for matrix'ed jobs). But!: You are not locked-in to use GitHub CI. GitHub integrates and shows the results of other CI systems too!
The reasons for GitHub are rather simple and more pronounced:
- Everyone, even non-Developers, know how to use GitHub.
- Everyone has an Account on GitHub.
- GitHub Actions are great and completely FREE (I repeat: free, unlimited access to great automated virtual machines that can do anything on any action trigger).
- GitHub Action runners are actual virtual machines (even windows/macos possible) and not just some hacky docker containers, allowing you to really do anything.
- The API and Documentation is top notch.
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?