GitLab vs Rancher: What are the differences?
What is GitLab? Open source self-hosted Git management software. 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 Rancher? Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service. Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.
GitLab and Rancher are primarily classified as "Code Collaboration & Version Control" and "Container" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by GitLab are:
- 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
On the other hand, Rancher provides the following key features:
- Manage Hosts, Deploy Containers, Monitor Resources
- User Management & Collaboration
- Native Docker APIs & Tools
"Self hosted", "Free" and "Has community edition" are the key factors why developers consider GitLab; whereas "Easy to use", "Open source and totally free" and "Multi-host docker-compose support" are the primary reasons why Rancher is favored.
GitLab and Rancher are both open source tools. It seems that GitLab with 20.1K GitHub stars and 5.33K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Rancher with 11.9K GitHub stars and 1.34K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, GitLab has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1233 company stacks & 1475 developers stacks; compared to Rancher, which is listed in 89 company stacks and 35 developer stacks.