As of November 2024, for most projects there is not a significant differences between the two that would be a deal breaker. GitHub and GitLab both have many similarities. That being said below are some of the differences between them.
Features | GitHub | GitLab |
---|---|---|
Open-source | No | Yes |
Launched | 2008 | 2014 |
Owner | Microsoft | GitLab inc |
Pricing | Free/ $4/ $21 | Free/ $29/ $99 |
Hosted on | Microsoft Azure | Google Cloud |
Desktop and Mobile Support | native support | third-party apps |
Learning curve | flat | steeper |
Planning, tracking, and project management |
native capabilities | native capabilities |
Uptime SLA | 99.9% | Uptime SLA couldn't be found |
Integration & apps | a lot | a few |
Adoption & user base | big | relatively smaller |
Social-features | extensive | not extensive |
Self-hosting | Paid | Free & Paid |
Security Tools out of the box | Excellent (9/10) | Outstanding (9.5/10) |
Some people prefer GitLab's high abstraction approach to CI/CD. While others prefer flexibility of GitHub Actions. I think that is subjective.
According to StackOverflow's 2022 survey to GitHub was the by far the most popular choice among developers both for personal and processional use.