GitLab

GitLab is a superb source code managemanet provide. It is free. We can install it in our privet server also. As well as we can use their server with a free account. We use git for version control. GitLab provides awesome support for version control. It is a very easy tool. Anyone can use it very easily If someone has no more knowledge about versioning but He can use GitLab very easy. We can maintain our Repositories/Branchers. User access level also there. Currently, We use GitLab. We maintain feature branches, dev branch, and master branch. Everyone does not allow to merge code to the dev branch. If someone add merge request to the dev branch, our one-person review code and merge. Then we use GitLab it is easy for us. GitLab provides superb dashboard it very easy to review code. It shows all code changes with file by file. Easy to compare. As well as we can compare two branches vary easy. It provides a clear, unique, user-friendly dashboard. GitLab also supports CI/CD process. It's superb we can recommend for anyone. If our commit has some conflict it shows how to resolve that step by step.

When I add a new commit. If the file is large/have many lines. It not showing code changes directly. It shows a message file has many lines cannot show changes that kind of message. Sometimes when we compare two commits. It not more clear. Some times confusing. If I show some file history only show commits. not showing code changes by commits. We want to go and check every commits to show changes.

The version control and tracking is on point, when we got everything working, managing these was a smooth and seamless experience.
Having customizable labels, helped a lot with the different merging requests and the final project deployment.

What I disliked the most of GitLab was probably when we started facing our first issues with user permission for some people of the team, took us a couple of days to fix what it could be a simple troubleshooting. It didn't help that the UI was a tad bit confusing for some of us.
There was a small confussion with the "Merge Request" option, I believe it should be called "Pull Request" instead, to avoid these problems.

- Unlike Github, it can be installed locally, it also makes it highly customizable
- It has CI/CD functionality integrated
- It has code search and indexing
- It's integrated with a docker registry and multiple code repositories

- It's highly monolithic, if some feature fails, most of the times everything fails
- It's not easy to clusterize the service
- It's not easy to update, nor to migrate to a new server
- It costs the same to use the self-hosted than the cloud-hosted version
- Gitlab CI/CD shared (both free and paid minutes) run on a GCE Kubernetes cluster without any fixed IP address so it's hard to access your servers unless you open ports publicly or create a VPN tunnel

GitLab is an awesome tool to use everyday. It is simple and easy to install on premise. The free tier is enough for any small business / team.

What really makes GitLab stands in front of the competition are its awesome CI/CD workflows. GitLab CI is incredible, you can do anything you want with it from building your sources, checking your code quality, deploying your projects... It is possible to make connections between various pipelines and have multiple repositories connected together to build your final "big" project.

Even if GitLab is simple to use, it's a big piece of software that can sometimes become slow on the web user interface.
Moreover the review system is sometimes not so easy to use compared to other competitors. Hopefully their are great browser extensions that solves this issues.