Blog Open Source GitLab Ultimate and Gold now free for education and open source
June 5, 2018
3 min read

GitLab Ultimate and Gold now free for education and open source

Our top-tier SaaS and self-managed offerings are now free to educational institutions and open source projects. Find out how to apply.

open-source-education-cover.png

Update 2023-02-15: This blog has been updated to remove an outdated reference to separately purchasing paid support. Current information on GitLab's Open Source benefits can be found here.

It has been a crazy 24 hours for GitLab. More than 2,000 people tweeted about #movingtogitlab. We imported over 100,000 repositories, and we've seen a 7x increase in orders. We went live on Bloomberg TV. And on top of that, Apple announced an Xcode integration with GitLab.

Github Imports Chart

We went live on YouTube on Sunday evening to answer your questions about #movingtogitlab and got a question from Mohammad Al-Ahdal who asked: "What about Education Discounts or Student Dev Packs?"

Today, we're excited to announce that GitLab Ultimate and Gold are now free for educational institutions and open source projects.

  1. Educational institutions application
  2. Open source projects application

What are GitLab Ultimate and GitLab Gold?

GitLab Ultimate and Gold are our most comprehensive offerings. GitLab Ultimate is self-managed, whereas GitLab Gold is our SaaS offering hosted on GitLab.com. It includes all of the features in Core, Starter, and Premium, plus a more robust set of portfolio management and security features. For open source and educational projects, this means unlimited access to current and new features, including Epics, Roadmap, Static Application Security Testing, Container Scanning, and so much more!

Does it come with support?

Free GitLab Ultimate and Gold accounts do not include support. Information on what's included can be found on our open-source program page.

Free GitLab account

Why provide a GitLab free account? We make GitLab free for education because we want students to use our most advanced features. Many universities already run GitLab. If the students use the advanced features of GitLab Ultimate and Gold they will take their experiences with these advanced features to their workplaces.

We would love to have more open source projects use GitLab. Public projects on GitLab.com already have all the features of GitLab Ultimate. And projects like GNOME and Debian already run their own server with the open source version of GitLab. With today's announcement, open source projects that are comfortable running on proprietary software can use all the features GitLab has to offer, while allowing us to have a sustainable business model by charging non-open source organizations.

We want to hear from you

Enjoyed reading this blog post or have questions or feedback? Share your thoughts by creating a new topic in the GitLab community forum. Share your feedback

Ready to get started?

See what your team could do with a unified DevSecOps Platform.

Get free trial

New to GitLab and not sure where to start?

Get started guide

Learn about what GitLab can do for your team

Talk to an expert