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.
