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Content last reviewed on 2025-06-03
This is the direction page for the Import group.
80% of our engineering capacity is dedicated to importers, specifically focusing on migration by direct transfer and third-party importer enhancements.
The remaining 20% is spent to support Cells initiative and respond to incoming Request for Help issues.
The Import group plays a critical role in GitLab's FY26 strategy. Our primary focus is providing essential capabilities that enable customer migrations, both from external tools to GitLab and between GitLab instances. We're working to ensure that migrations between GitLab instances and from third-party platforms are seamless, reliable, and user-friendly.
As part of DevOps Engineering, we will closely partner with other teams to optimize the new customer journey, ensuring seamless onboarding through improved importer experiences.
A typical organization looking to adopt GitLab already has many other tools. Artifacts such as code, issues, and epics may already exist and are being used daily. Seamless transition of work in progress is critically important, and a great experience during this migration creates a positive first impression of GitLab. Solving these transitions, even for complex cases, is crucial for GitLab's ability to expand in the market. Instilling confidence in users that their data will be migrated quickly and with maximum care is of utmost importance.
Supporting GitLab's objectives the Import group is focused on making imports reliable and performant at any scale. Large-scale moves to GitLab should be significantly easier and ultimately reach a first-class experience level.
Our focus areas for improvement include:
Ease of use: Customers looking to import their data sometimes struggle to find the place in GitLab where they can initiate imports. Once found, the user interactions are not always intuitive, and the flow is not fully user-friendly. Improving the user experience in this area will make our importers more lovable.
Reliability: A portion of our current issues are related to the solution's reliability. Imports don't always succeed, and when they fail, there is little guidance for users on steps they can take to remedy the failure. We are working on making our importers more reliable so that our customers can have confidence in the migration process.
Scalability and performance: Large organizations looking to move possibly hundreds or thousands of projects from tools like GitHub or Bitbucket to GitLab, or from self-managed GitLab instances to GitLab.com or GitLab Dedicated, need to be able to do so efficiently and reliably.
For FY26, the Import and Integrate group is focusing on key initiatives that directly support GitLab's company objectives:
Mapping user contributions after migrations was a manual, time-consuming process that had to be done through the UI one user at a time. For organizations with hundreds or thousands of users, this was a significant bottleneck.
We've implemented bulk CSV-based mapping to dramatically reduce the effort required to preserve user contributions during migrations. This enhancement benefits not just migration by direct transfer between GitLab instances but also third-party importers, including those for GitHub, Bitbucket Server and Gitea.
This work was delivered in Q1 FY26.
While long-term plans include a new migration platform (Org Mover) dependent on the Portable Organization feature (likely 2-3 years away), Direct Transfer remains the critical bridge solution that must be properly maintained and improved. We're also focusing on making third-party importers more sustainable and enabling external contributions for new third-party importers, as these tools directly impact our ability to acquire new customers from competitors.
This table provides a quick overview of what GitLab importers exist today and which most important objects they each support. This list is not exhaustive and detailed information can be found on the Importers documentation page.
| Import source | Repos | MRs | Issues | Epics | Milestones | Wiki | Designs | API * |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Migration by direct transfer | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| GitHub | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Bitbucket Cloud | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Bitbucket Server | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| FogBugz | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Gitea | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| GitLab export | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
A notable gap in GitLab's current offerings is the lack of a proper backup and restore solution for GitLab.com. Currently, customers repurpose our export/import functionality for backups, though it was never designed for this use case. GitLab itself uses export/import functionality in case of incidents. This creates challenges for customers and significantly increases the operational load on our infrastructure teams. While addressing this need is vital, it is outside of the scope of our group. We are, however, looking into the actual usage of exports for backup purposes, and may consider restricting the number of allowed project exports in a period.
While our long-term goal is to provide all the GitLab importing capabilities needed by our customers in our application, we recognize that specific migration scenarios may require additional support.
GitLab Professional Services team uses the Congregate tool to orchestrate user, group, and project import API calls to help customers automate scaled migrations. With migration by direct transfer reaching GA status, we'll be able to enhance the capabilities of Congregate and provide a more reliable and scalable migration experience for our largest customers.
For complex migrations, especially for large enterprise customers moving to GitLab Dedicated, we recommend engaging with our Professional Services team to ensure a smooth transition.
We strongly encourage and welcome community contributions across all our importers. Recent releases have seen significant enhancements through community contributions, demonstrating the value of this collaborative approach.
For guidance on contributing, please reach out to the team directly or check our feedback issue where your input helps us improve these tools for everyone.