Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

GitLab

60.5K
51.8K
+ 1
2.5K
Salt

419
448
+ 1
164
Add tool

GitLab vs Salt: What are the differences?

Introduction: In the realm of software development and system configuration management, GitLab and Salt are two widely-used tools. Each serves a unique purpose and offers distinct functionalities that cater to specific needs within the industry.

  1. Version Control vs. Infrastructure Management: GitLab primarily serves as a version control system, allowing developers to track changes in the source code, manage branches, and collaborate on coding projects. On the other hand, Salt is an infrastructure management tool that focuses on automating the configuration and provisioning of servers and network devices.

  2. Centralized Repository vs. Distributed Architecture: GitLab follows a centralized repository model where all code changes are stored and managed in a central location. In contrast, Salt utilizes a decentralized, or distributed, architecture where configuration information is distributed across the managed infrastructure, allowing for greater scalability and resilience.

  3. Code Collaboration vs. Configuration Orchestration: While GitLab excels in facilitating code collaboration, reviews, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, Salt specializes in configuration orchestration, ensuring that the desired state of infrastructure components is maintained consistently across all machines.

  4. User Interface and Workflow: GitLab boasts a user-friendly web interface that enables team members to interact with the code repository visually, track issues, and plan projects effectively. Salt, on the other hand, relies more heavily on configuration files and command-line interfaces to define and deploy infrastructure changes.

  5. Community and Ecosystem: GitLab has a robust community and marketplace ecosystem, offering a wide range of integrations, plugins, and extensions to extend its functionality further. Salt, while also supported by an active community, emphasizes a more CLI-driven approach for managing infrastructure configurations.

  6. Primary Audience and Use Cases: GitLab is primarily targeted towards software developers, enabling them to collaborate on code, manage repositories, and automate software deployment processes. Salt, on the other hand, caters to system administrators and DevOps engineers who seek to automate and streamline the configuration of infrastructure components.

In Summary, GitLab and Salt serve distinct purposes in the software development and system management landscapes, with GitLab primarily focusing on version control and code collaboration, while Salt specializes in infrastructure automation and configuration management.

Decisions about GitLab and Salt
Elmar Wouters
CEO, Managing Director at Wouters Media · | 7 upvotes · 495.5K 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.

See more
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?

See more
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?

See more
Weverton Timoteo

One of the magic tricks git performs is the ability to rewrite log history. You can do it in many ways, but git rebase -i is the one I most use. With this command, It’s possible to switch commits order, remove a commit, squash two or more commits, or edit, for instance.

It’s particularly useful to run it before opening a pull request. It allows developers to “clean up” the mess and organize commits before submitting to review. If you follow the practice 3 and 4, then the list of commits should look very similar to a task list. It should reveal the rationale you had, telling the story of how you end up with that final code.

See more
Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 8 upvotes · 661.8K views

Out of most of the VCS solutions out there, we found Gitlab was the most feature complete with a free community edition. Their DevSecops offering is also a very robust solution. Gitlab CI/CD was quite easy to setup and the direct integration with your VCS + CI/CD is also a bonus. Out of the box integration with major cloud providers, alerting through instant messages etc. are all extremely convenient. We push our CI/CD updates to MS Teams.

See more

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!

See more
Nazar Atamaniuk
Shared insights
on
DeployPlaceDeployPlaceGitHubGitHubGitLabGitLab

At DeployPlace we use self-hosted GitLab, we have chosen GitLab as most of us are familiar with it. We are happy with all features GitLab provides, I can’t imagine our life without integrated GitLab CI. Another important feature for us is integrated code review tool, we use it every day, we use merge requests, code reviews, branching. To be honest, most of us have GitHub accounts as well, we like to contribute in open source, and we want to be a part of the tech community, but lack of solutions from GitHub in the area of CI doesn’t let us chose it for our projects.

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of GitLab
Pros of Salt
  • 508
    Self hosted
  • 430
    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
  • 34
    Free private repository
  • 34
    Has an official mobile app
  • 31
    Continuous Integration
  • 22
    Open source, great ui (like github)
  • 18
    Slack Integration
  • 14
    Full CI flow
  • 11
    Free and unlimited private git repos
  • 10
    User, group, and project access management is simple
  • 9
    All in one (Git, CI, Agile..)
  • 8
    Built-in CI
  • 8
    Intuitive UI
  • 6
    Both public and private Repositories
  • 6
    Full DevOps suite with Git
  • 5
    Build/pipeline definition alongside code
  • 5
    CI
  • 5
    So easy to use
  • 5
    Integrated Docker Registry
  • 5
    It's powerful source code management tool
  • 4
    Issue system
  • 4
    Dockerized
  • 4
    Unlimited free repos & collaborators
  • 4
    Security and Stable
  • 4
    On-premises
  • 4
    It's fully integrated
  • 4
    Mattermost Chat client
  • 4
    Excellent
  • 3
    Great for team collaboration
  • 3
    Built-in Docker Registry
  • 3
    Low maintenance cost due omnibus-deployment
  • 3
    I like the its runners and executors feature
  • 3
    Free private repos
  • 3
    Because is the best remote host for git repositories
  • 3
    Not Microsoft Owned
  • 3
    Opensource
  • 2
    Groups of groups
  • 2
    Powerful software planning and maintaining tools
  • 2
    Review Apps feature
  • 2
    Kubernetes integration with GitLab CI
  • 2
    It includes everything I need, all packaged with docker
  • 2
    Multilingual interface
  • 2
    HipChat intergration
  • 2
    Powerful Continuous Integration System
  • 2
    One-click install through DigitalOcean
  • 2
    The dashboard with deployed environments
  • 2
    Native CI
  • 2
    Many private repo
  • 2
    Kubernetes Integration
  • 2
    Published IP list for whitelisting (gl-infra#434)
  • 2
    Wounderful
  • 2
    Beautiful
  • 1
    Supports Radius/Ldap & Browser Code Edits
  • 46
    Flexible
  • 30
    Easy
  • 27
    Remote execution
  • 24
    Enormously flexible
  • 12
    Great plugin API
  • 10
    Python
  • 5
    Extensible
  • 3
    Scalable
  • 2
    nginx
  • 1
    Vagrant provisioner
  • 1
    HipChat
  • 1
    Best IaaC
  • 1
    Automatisation
  • 1
    Parallel Execution

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of GitLab
Cons of Salt
  • 28
    Slow ui performance
  • 8
    Introduce breaking bugs every release
  • 6
    Insecure (no published IP list for whitelisting)
  • 2
    Built-in Docker Registry
  • 1
    Review Apps feature
  • 1
    Bloated
  • 1
    Dangerous
  • 1
    No immutable infrastructure

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

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 Salt?

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use GitLab?
What companies use Salt?
See which teams inside your own company are using GitLab or Salt.
Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with GitLab?
What tools integrate with Salt?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

What are some alternatives to GitLab and Salt?
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