
Ask HN: GitHub vs. GitLab paid plans (2017) - petecooper
I&#x27;ve reached the point of needing 3rd-party git hosting and I&#x27;m looking at a shortlist of GitLab and GitHub.<p>Use case is straightforward: front end developer, team of one (me), small chance I will need to handoff of repo to a client in its entirety once or twice a year, along with written confirmation there is no trace on my system.<p>The paid plans are virtually the same $-wise (both single-figure $ a month). They also offer a whole raft of stuff that I can compare and contrast for as much time as I care to.<p>I&#x27;ve run GitLab CE on a Raspberry Pi 3 internally. It&#x27;s been a bumpy ride with some of the recent updates, but nothing catastrophic has happened. It was a bit touch-and-go on some updates freezing my Pi, but the experience has given me a good insight into the GitLab UI, workflow and the like. And it&#x27;s fine, actually.<p>GitHub. I do some open source things, and all the projects I&#x27;m involved with are on GitHub. I have no reason to doubt their paid-plan product is fine. Different to GitLab, of course, but fine nonetheless.<p>Which leaves me at this odd decision: the $ value is trivial, and the services are both fine in their own way…<p>…which doesn&#x27;t help the decision process.<p>And so, I come asking for your advice and feedback: GitHub or GitLab?<p>Thanks for reading.
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brudgers
Bitbucket is another option. Between the three, it is probably the one with
the least incentive to monetize repositories in a way that leverages vendor
lock-in because Atlassian has other diverse revenue streams and appears to
have a fairly stable business and solid management.

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kiloreux
This, I have been using bitbucket for the last few months and have been a more
than happy customer. They have been redesigning their website UI/UX and so far
using their tooling with pipelines for testing and deployment have been more
than reliable. Totally prefer them over gitlab but I do still use GitHub for
OSS of course.

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krob
Who needs to pay when you can startup a simple droplet / linode instance /
lightsail / <VPS> of your choice and setup phabricator. It's not exceptionally
complicated, written in a language that doesn't require complex configuration,
can poll repo updates from remote servers, can additionally host repos. Also
used by some major companies & open source projects. Uber, wikimedia, freebsd
, redhat, KDE, Blender, Dropbox, Quora, Disqus, Khan Academy, LLVM, Cisco
Systems, Bloomberg. So it can't be that bad.. I use it every day, gets the job
done, and I don't have to ask someone else to do a pull request.

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petecooper
Valid point. The $ cost per month of a personal paid plan is, to me, enough to
let someone take care of the hosting for me. I've run my own git servers for a
couple of years, and now I want to pay someone to do it.

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james-skemp
I'm paying for GitHub (lowest level) but use Gitlab a lot more these days.

I like GitHub's UI a lot more, but the University I work at uses Gitlab CE, so
I've gotten used to it. Their permissions setup is particularly frustrating
for me, on .com. I want a single option to make a repo completely public and
there isn't one.

Gitlab's CI service is fantastic, and the reason I've jumped on board, since
now I host all my sites on it, after moving to Hugo and Jekyll.

However, GitHub seems to have better uptime.

I don't think you can go wrong either way, and you may not even need to pay
given what Gitlab gives away for free.

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dudul
Why are you even considering paying for gitlab? What feature do you need that
is not available in the free edition?

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petecooper
Good question. The CE version is fine for me, especially if it's hosted on
gitlab.com, but then if something goes wrong I'm working on the basis that
paid plan holders have a higher priority for getting fixed.

That might be bogus logic, I don't know -- it's more of a gut feeling.

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dudul
The CE version is open source. I would argue that the gut feeling would be
that it gets fixed faster than the enterprise version. Maybe not deployed as
fast though.

Anyway, I would just go with GitLab regardless. It is more of a turn key
solution than GitHub. You can set up automatic builds, use project management
tools, etc.

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apetresc
Looking at the commits for GitLab CE, I can't really find a single recent
contribution by someone not employed by GitLab. So I doubt it "gets fixed
faster" than the enterprise version.

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blackst0ne
Actually there are many community contributions. E.g. for 9.5 it's 82 merged
MRs from the community.

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/merge_requests?scope...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=merged&label_name\[\]=Community%20Contribution&milestone_title=9.5)

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atsaloli
There are two support levels for GitLab EE (Enterprise Edition) users: Starter
(response by next business day) and Premium (response within 4 hours).

As a GitLab reseller, I offer HN users 10% discount on GitLab EE. My email
address is in my profile.

The pricing plans are at
[https://about.gitlab.com/products/](https://about.gitlab.com/products/)

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superman1985
I would not use either of those. GitBlit is FREE and gives me everything and
more that any paid service offers. It's been several years and I still have
not had the need to switch to paid git hosting. The ONLY feature that I miss
from GitHub is pull request commenting. Other than that, there is basically no
difference.

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Kpourdeilami
The tooling around Github is a lot better

