StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Code Collaboration Version Control
  5. GitLab vs GitLab CI

GitLab vs GitLab CI

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

GitLab
GitLab
Stacks63.4K
Followers54.5K
Votes2.5K
GitHub Stars0
Forks0
GitLab CI
GitLab CI
Stacks2.3K
Followers1.6K
Votes75
GitHub Stars0
Forks0

GitLab vs GitLab CI: What are the differences?

GitLab vs GitLab CI

GitLab is a web-based platform that provides a Git repository manager allowing developers to easily collaborate and manage their codebase. On the other hand, GitLab CI is a continuous integration and continuous deployment platform integrated within GitLab. Below are the key differences between GitLab and GitLab CI:

  1. Built-in Version Control vs Continuous Integration: GitLab provides traditional version control functionality, allowing developers to manage and track changes in their codebase. GitLab CI, on the other hand, focuses on automating and streamlining the software development process by providing continuous integration and continuous deployment capabilities.

  2. Collaboration and Repository Management vs Automated Testing and Deployment: GitLab primarily focuses on collaboration and repository management, providing features such as code reviews, issue tracking, and project management tools. GitLab CI, on the other hand, focuses on automating various stages of the software development lifecycle, such as building, testing, and deploying code.

  3. Code Hosting and Repository Features vs CI/CD Pipelines: GitLab provides a robust code hosting platform, offering features like branch management, merge requests, and access controls. GitLab CI, however, focuses on setting up and managing CI/CD pipelines, allowing developers to automate the testing and deployment of their codebases.

  4. Code Versioning and History Tracking vs Pipeline Configuration: GitLab allows developers to track and manage code versions, providing a detailed history of changes made to the repository. GitLab CI, on the other hand, focuses on configuring and managing the CI/CD pipelines, defining the build, test, and deployment steps for the codebase.

  5. Branching and Merging vs Testing and Job Execution: GitLab provides comprehensive branching and merging capabilities, allowing developers to work on different features or bug fixes simultaneously. GitLab CI, on the other hand, is designed for running tests and executing jobs within the defined CI/CD pipeline, ensuring code quality and facilitating automated deployments.

  6. Project Management and Issue Tracking vs Continuous Integration Monitoring: GitLab offers a range of project management and issue tracking features, enabling teams to plan, organize, and track progress on their projects. GitLab CI, however, focuses on monitoring the continuous integration process, providing real-time feedback on the status of the CI/CD pipelines, test results, and deployment statuses.

In summary, GitLab serves as a collaborative repository management platform, while GitLab CI focuses on automating the continuous integration and deployment processes within GitLab.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on GitLab, GitLab CI

Anonymous
Anonymous

May 25, 2020

Decided

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!

624k views624k
Comments
Weverton
Weverton

CTO at SourceLevel

Jul 28, 2020

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?

944k views944k
Comments
Weverton
Weverton

CTO at SourceLevel

Aug 3, 2020

Review

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?

1.19M views1.19M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

GitLab
GitLab
GitLab CI
GitLab CI

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.

GitLab offers a continuous integration service. If you add a .gitlab-ci.yml file to the root directory of your repository, and configure your GitLab project to use a Runner, then each merge request or push triggers your CI pipeline.

Manage git repositories with fine grained access controls that keep your code secure;Perform code reviews and enhance collaboration with merge requests;Each project can also have an issue tracker and a wiki;Used by more than 100,000 organizations, GitLab is the most popular solution to manage git repositories on-premises;Completely free and open source (MIT Expat license);Powered by Ruby on Rails
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
0
GitHub Stars
0
GitHub Forks
0
GitHub Forks
0
Stacks
63.4K
Stacks
2.3K
Followers
54.5K
Followers
1.6K
Votes
2.5K
Votes
75
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 508
    Self hosted
  • 431
    Free
  • 339
    Has community edition
  • 242
    Easy setup
  • 240
    Familiar interface
Cons
  • 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
Pros
  • 22
    Robust CI with awesome Docker support
  • 13
    Simple configuration
  • 9
    All in one solution
  • 7
    Source Control and CI in one place
  • 5
    Easy to configure own build server i.e. GitLab-Runner
Cons
  • 2
    Works best with GitLab repositories

What are some alternatives to GitLab, GitLab CI?

GitHub

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.

Bitbucket

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.

Jenkins

Jenkins

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Travis CI

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

CircleCI

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

TeamCity

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

Drone.io

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

wercker

wercker

Wercker is a CI/CD developer automation platform designed for Microservices & Container Architecture.

RhodeCode

RhodeCode

RhodeCode provides centralized control over distributed code repositories. Developers get code review tools and custom APIs that work in Mercurial, Git & SVN. Firms get unified security and user control so that their CTOs can sleep at night

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana