Comment by javier2

6 hours ago

We switched to gitlab at work about five years ago and this perfectly summarizes my experience. Add to that Gitlab projects also have a included Maven, NPM and python compatible package registry, so you can just push your package back in the CI pipeline is one of my favourite features as a smaller team. My least favorite feature is actually the sheer number of features. There is actually too many features. And the constant waiting. Basically every screen is just twice as slow as I would like to wait.

After using Stash for ages at work we switched to gitlab which was refreshing. It was fast, self hosted, and full of features, especially useful around quality gates and build on PRs. Then it was decided we should go for best of suite instead of breed and we went to azure devops.

It is slow as molasses, issues are more project management oriented instead of coding, quality gates are virtually non existent and builds are now slow. Builds are slow because instead of our beefy build servers they run on VMs, that are undersized and have IOPS restrictions, because downloading the cache for maven/docker/npm is relatively fast but actually expanding it on disk is slow, because just the simple orchestration to spawn a job is also slow.

I would love to go back to gitlab and I would even dedicate some time to performance tune it and contribute back. I think gitlab does everything right. (Technically, not sure about pricing and tiering.)