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GitLab

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GitLab vs WakaTime: What are the differences?

## Introduction

GitLab and WakaTime are two popular tools that serve different purposes in the software development process. Here are key differences between GitLab and WakaTime:

1. **Primary Functionality**: GitLab is a comprehensive DevOps platform that provides a repository manager, CI/CD pipelines, issue tracking, and more, all in one integrated solution. It facilitates collaboration among development teams and helps manage the entire software development lifecycle. On the other hand, WakaTime is a code time tracking tool that integrates with various code editors to track time spent coding, provide insights into productivity, and help developers improve their coding habits.

2. **Focus on Collaboration vs. Individual Productivity**: GitLab focuses on enabling collaboration and coordination among team members by providing tools for version control, issue tracking, code review, and project management. It emphasizes team productivity and streamlining workflows. In contrast, WakaTime is more geared towards individual productivity, offering insights into personal coding habits, time management, and helping developers stay focused on their tasks.

3. **Scope of Integration**: GitLab offers a wide range of integrations with other tools and services commonly used in the software development process, such as Docker, Kubernetes, Slack, and Jira. It aims to provide a seamless experience by connecting various tools and streamlining workflows. WakaTime, on the other hand, primarily focuses on integrating with code editors like Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, and PyCharm to track coding time and provide productivity metrics directly within the developer's workflow.

4. **Pricing Model**: GitLab offers a range of pricing plans, including a free tier for small teams and a paid tier for larger organizations with additional features and support. The pricing is based on the number of users and storage requirements. WakaTime also offers a free tier with basic features but follows a subscription-based model for advanced features such as detailed reports, goal tracking, and integrations with project management tools.

5. **Support and Community**: GitLab has a large and active community of developers and contributors who actively participate in improving the platform, sharing knowledge, and providing support. It also offers comprehensive documentation and support resources for users. In comparison, WakaTime focuses more on providing direct support to individual users through its customer support channels, with a smaller emphasis on community interaction.

6. **Customizability and Extensibility**: GitLab allows for extensive customization and configuration options, enabling users to tailor the platform to their specific needs and workflows. It supports self-hosted deployment for organizations that require complete control over their infrastructure. WakaTime, on the other hand, offers fewer customization options as it primarily focuses on providing a streamlined experience for tracking coding time and productivity insights within code editors.

In Summary, GitLab and WakaTime differ in their primary functionality, focus on collaboration vs. individual productivity, scope of integration, pricing model, support and community, and customizability and extensibility.

Decisions about GitLab and WakaTime
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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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.

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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 8 upvotes · 714.4K 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.

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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!

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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.

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Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
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Pros of GitLab
Pros of WakaTime
  • 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
  • 17
    Automatic time tracking per project
  • 12
    It's a great way to manage my time
  • 8
    Time log next to each commit on GitHub
  • 5
    Big choice of supported IDEs
  • 5
    Productivity
  • 4
    Vim integration
  • 1
    Eclipse integration

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Cons of GitLab
Cons of WakaTime
  • 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
  • 1
    Slow down the IDE

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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 WakaTime?

Quantify your coding - open source plugins for automatic time tracking & insights into your programming.

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What companies use GitLab?
What companies use WakaTime?
Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
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What tools integrate with GitLab?
What tools integrate with WakaTime?

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What are some alternatives to GitLab and WakaTime?
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