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GitLab vs Perforce: What are the differences?

Introduction

GitLab and Perforce are both version control systems used by software development teams to manage and track changes to their codebase. While they share similarities in their basic functionality, there are key differences that set them apart.

  1. Code Ownership: One major difference between GitLab and Perforce is their approach to code ownership. GitLab follows a distributed model, where each developer has their own repository and can work independently. On the other hand, Perforce uses a centralized model, where all code is stored in a central repository and developers need to check out files before making changes.

  2. Branching Strategy: GitLab offers a more flexible and powerful branching strategy compared to Perforce. GitLab uses a lightweight branching model, allowing developers to easily create and merge branches for different features or bug fixes. Perforce, on the other hand, uses a more traditional branching approach, which can be complex and time-consuming for large projects.

  3. Integration and Extensibility: GitLab has a strong focus on integration and extensibility. It provides a wide range of integrations with other tools commonly used in software development, such as issue tracking systems, continuous integration/delivery platforms, and chatops. Perforce, while offering some integrations, may not have the same level of extensibility and integration options as GitLab.

  4. Open Source: GitLab is an open-source platform, which means that the source code is freely available to the public and can be modified and distributed by anyone. This openness allows for greater community collaboration and contributions. Perforce, on the other hand, is a proprietary software that is not open source.

  5. Licensing: Another difference between GitLab and Perforce is their licensing model. GitLab offers both a free community edition and a paid enterprise edition. The community edition provides most of the basic functionality needed for small to medium-sized teams, while the enterprise edition offers additional features and support for larger organizations. Perforce, on the other hand, has a commercial licensing model, where users need to purchase licenses to use the software.

  6. Scalability: GitLab is known for its scalability and can handle large codebases and high volumes of traffic efficiently. It has features like scaling horizontally by adding more servers and using load balancers to distribute the workload. Perforce, while also scalable, may require additional configuration and setup to handle large-scale projects.

In summary, GitLab and Perforce differ in their approach to code ownership, branching strategy, integration and extensibility, open-source nature, licensing model, and scalability capabilities.

Advice on GitLab and Perforce
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 · | 18 upvotes · 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 · | 1 upvotes · 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 · | 7 upvotes · 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 · | 7 upvotes · 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 · | 3 upvotes · 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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Decisions about GitLab and Perforce
ibrahim Al-Beladi

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.

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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.
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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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Eduardo Fernandez
Software Engineer at Parrot Software, Inc. · | 8 upvotes · 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 · | 17 upvotes · 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 · | 7 upvotes · 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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Pros of GitLab
Pros of Perforce
  • 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
  • 3
    Powerful
  • 3
    Great for Enterprise level use
  • 2
    Robust
  • 1
    Scalable

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Cons of GitLab
Cons of Perforce
  • 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
    Be the first to leave a con

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    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 Perforce?

    Visibility, access control, workflow and code management for Git environments. Flexibility of collaborating on the same codebase and code reviews using any combination of Perforce and Git workflows and tools without compromise.

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    What companies use GitLab?
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    What are some alternatives to GitLab and Perforce?
    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 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
    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.
    Gogs
    The goal of this project is to make the easiest, fastest and most painless way to set up a self-hosted Git service. With Go, this can be done in independent binary distribution across ALL platforms that Go supports, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
    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.
    See all alternatives