GitLab vs GitHub

GitLab

GitHub

Progress bar that shows the current feature capability as adequate

GitHub offers the broadest range of capabilities of any of our competitors, but still lacks the depth and breadth of features provided by GitLab, the most comprehensive platform on the market.

View our DevOps maturity comparison chart

GitLab

Plan, organize, and track team progress using Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, and other Agile methodologies.

Projected Future Capability

comprehensive

Learn more about where GitLab projects this category to be by Q3 FY24

Details

Scrum/Kanban: The GitLab issue board is a software project management tool used to plan, organize, and visualize a workflow for a feature or product release. It can be used as a Kanban or a Scrum board.
SAFe and Other Agile Methodologies: Flexible Enterprise Agile Framework support for any Team of Team framework. Achieved with a combination of: deeply nested org structure, multi-level epics and flexible time boxes like iterations, milestones and roadmap for portfolio level views of dates. Health status allows roll up of status at epic. Does not natively support SAFe.
Burnup/Burndown charts show the progress of completing a milestone
Insights: Configure the Insights that matter for your projects to explore data such as triage hygiene, issues created/closed per a given period, average time for merge requests to be merged and much more.

Improving our product capabilities

We have added more out-of-the-box functionality that aligns to industry-standard program and portfolio management, including frameworks like SAFe, LeSS, and Disciplined Agile.
Today, GitLab uses many different objects to facilitate planning and tracking work. Over the next year, we will be converting all of these into a standard underlying work item with robust support for effortlessly modeling different roll-up hierarchies and relationships depending on which agile methodology an organization is currently utilizing.
We will also be introducing flexible, embeddable saved views and queries that will allow teams and individual personas to visualize and track work in the way that works best for their needs and particular use cases. These advancements will enable organizations to use a set of robust primitives to solve the majority of enterprise planning and portfolio management use cases, from linking work items with value opportunities, OKRs, and outcome metrics to designing and tracking the ROI of value streams with complex dependency chains across the organization.

Documentation

GitHub

Progress bar that shows the current feature capability as basic

Projects is an adaptable, flexible tool for planning and tracking work on GitHub.

Details

Scrum: GitHub Projects lets you create Sprints and manage Issues (aka PBIs or Tasks)
- Track Sprints
- Track estimates
- Add custom fields to Issues
- Collate Issues from multiple repos
- Set up automated workflows for your Issues in a project
Kanban: You can use templates to quickly set up a new classic project. When you use a template to create a classic project, your new board will include columns as well as cards with tips for using projects (classic). You can also choose a template with automation already configured.
SAFe: No Support

Additional

GitHub Issues is the project management tool used within GitHub
(Feature-by-Feature Comparison here)

Documentation

GitLab

Plan, organize, and track team progress using Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, and other Agile methodologies.

Details

Scrum/Kanban: The GitLab issue board is a software project management tool used to plan, organize, and visualize a workflow for a feature or product release. It can be used as a Kanban or a Scrum board.
SAFe and Other Agile Methodologies: Flexible Enterprise Agile Framework support for any Team of Team framework. Achieved with a combination of: deeply nested org structure, multi-level epics and flexible time boxes like iterations, milestones and roadmap for portfolio level views of dates. Health status allows roll up of status at epic. Does not natively support SAFe.
Burnup/Burndown charts show the progress of completing a milestone
Insights: Configure the Insights that matter for your projects to explore data such as triage hygiene, issues created/closed per a given period, average time for merge requests to be merged and much more.

Improving our product capabilities

We have added more out-of-the-box functionality that aligns to industry-standard program and portfolio management, including frameworks like SAFe, LeSS, and Disciplined Agile.
Today, GitLab uses many different objects to facilitate planning and tracking work. Over the next year, we will be converting all of these into a standard underlying work item with robust support for effortlessly modeling different roll-up hierarchies and relationships depending on which agile methodology an organization is currently utilizing.
We will also be introducing flexible, embeddable saved views and queries that will allow teams and individual personas to visualize and track work in the way that works best for their needs and particular use cases. These advancements will enable organizations to use a set of robust primitives to solve the majority of enterprise planning and portfolio management use cases, from linking work items with value opportunities, OKRs, and outcome metrics to designing and tracking the ROI of value streams with complex dependency chains across the organization.

Documentation

Overview analysis

GitHub has a very weak offering in this stage, with basic capabilities in Portfolio Management and Team Planning, and lacking capabilities in all other Plan stage features.

GitLab's product roadmap

Adding more out-of-the-box functionality that aligns to industry-standard program and portfolio management
Display DevOps data within Plan that is easy to understand for all personas, including non-developers.
Introducing flexible, embeddable saved views and queries that will allow teams and individual personas to visualize and track work