I use GitLab when building side-projects and MVPs. The interface and interactions are close enough to those of GitHub to prevent cognitive switching costs between professional and personal projects hosted on different services.

GitLab also provides a suite of tools including issue/project management, CI/CD with GitLab CI, and validation/landing pages with GitLab Pages. With everything in one place, on an #OpenSourceCloud GitLab makes it easy for me to manage much larger projects on my own, than would be possible with other solutions or tools.

It's petty I know, but I can also read the GitLab code diffs far more easily than diffs on GitHub or Bitbucket...they just look better in my opinion.

I have mixed feelings on GitHub as a product and our use of it for the Zulip open source project. On the one hand, I do feel that being on GitHub helps people discover Zulip, because we have enough stars (etc.) that we rank highly among projects on the platform. and there is a definite benefit for lowering barriers to contribution (which is important to us) that GitHub has such a dominant position in terms of what everyone has accounts with.

But even ignoring how one might feel about their new corporate owner (MicroSoft), in a lot of ways GitHub is a bad product for open source projects. Years after the "Dear GitHub" letter, there are still basic gaps in its issue tracker:

• You can't give someone permission to label/categorize issues without full write access to a project (including ability to merge things to master, post releases, etc.).
• You can't let anyone with a GitHub account self-assign issues to themselves.
• Many more similar issues.

It's embarrassing, because I've talked to GitHub product managers at various open source events about these things for 3 years, and they always agree the thing is important, but then nothing ever improves in the Issues product. Maybe the new management at MicroSoft will fix their product management situation, but if not, I imagine we'll eventually do the migration to GitLab.

We have a custom bot project, http://github.com/zulip/zulipbot, to deal with some of these issues where possible, and every other large project we talk to does the same thing, more or less.

Bitbucket provides 5 private repositories for free that is I believe the best feature. GitLab seems very simmilar to GitHub. The only reason I've choosen GitHub is its popularity. It seems faster than GitLab, uglier than Bitbucket and featured as others. The best open source projects are hosted on GitHub. Many applications are integrated with GitHub like my favourite #GitKraken.

Keep with GitHub if you feel comfortable, If you want to switch to other keep in mind the change of mindset and you will need time to adapt, i'm not saying that GitLab is bad or difficult just the opposite, but it can be overwhelming because it have more integrated features (I love this) than GitHub , what it means more configs available that you can mess up.

I use GitLab because of the tight integration with Gitlab CI. I noticed that having the entire build chain integrated into one platform, makes it easier for developers and infrastructure engineers to work with automated testing and deploying even though not everybody has the same amount of experience with it.

As an former administrator for GitLab enterprise I can say for closed source development it is an amazing tool to have. It does however have limits. For starters you will need to bother your unix administrators to assign a license to you. And after that happens the same guys start getting cranky if you use git