Blog Company Thinking about moving to GitLab? Here are 5 reasons why you should.
June 11, 2018
5 min read

Thinking about moving to GitLab? Here are 5 reasons why you should.

Inspired by #movingtogitlab? We've put together our top reasons to give it a try.

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We've been getting a lot of questions about what makes GitLab great and worthy of developers’ business and, most importantly, trust. So we decided to take some time to list out the top five reasons to move to GitLab:

1. It's the only single application for the entire Devops cycle

GitLab is the first application built to cover all stages of the DevOps cycle. This means product, development, QA, and Ops teams can all work together concurrently, making the software development lifecycle three times faster. Built-in continuous integration and continuous delivery features make it seamless to go from a code change to a running pipeline. On top of that, GitLab has project management, issue tracking, and free private repository hosting to make it easier to plan and manage your projects. Because GitLab is open, it has great integrations with many other tools, including container orchestration tools like Kubernetes.

2. Security is built in

We're keenly aware that security is critical in software development, and too often security is at the end of the SDLC. In GitLab, security is first class. Security checks are built into merge requests (MRs), with problems being reported directly in pipelines and MRs. Some of our integrated security features include:

  • Dependency scanning
  • Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
  • Dynamic Application Security Testing
  • Container scanning

In GitLab, every code change can be scanned automatically.

3. It's open core

GitLab is open core. GitLab Core is open source, while higher tiers of self-managed GitLab include both open source and proprietary features. Our Community Edition (CE) repository includes only open source code, while the Enterprise Edition repository (EE) holds both open source and proprietary code, but operates like CE, thanks to a publicly visible issue tracker. This means that whether you use GitLab Core, GitLab.com, GitLab Ultimate, or anything in between, you can influence and contribute to GitLab, and keep an eye on where things are going.

You can read about our stewardship of the open source project and check out our recent post which goes into more detail about the different GitLab tiers.

4. Transparency is by default

Building and maintaining open and honest relationships with users is at the core of our value system. Everything we do is public by default. Our entire handbook is open to the public along with our website’s repository.

5. Everyone can contribute

This GitLab principle is applicable to your project’s workflow and our own application. Our platform allows all project stakeholders – from VPs and directors to ScrumMasters, developers and writers – to collaborate and communicate in one place, allowing for organized and open discourse.

Anyone can create an issue or MR to improve GitLab. We welcome community contributions and celebrate them by designating a Most Valuable Person (MVP) every month. With our public issue tracker, anyone can propose, contribute to, and discuss GitLab’s features. Since we ship a new release on the 22nd of each month, the implementation of public contributions and input are visible in short order.

Ready to make your move? We’ve made it pretty easy to migrate projects to GitLab. Check out our documentation or this video tutorial to get moving today.

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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

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