I literally just spun up an instance of gitlab today. I'm regretting using bitnami's version though... all their documentation is out of date, and they change a lot of defaults and break things. It's been an unpleasant experience.
That said. A fresh instance of bitbucket hosted close to our office vs bitbucket? No contest.
Thanks for trying GitLab! We're not happy with the Bitnami version, from https://about.gitlab.com/installation/ "One-click installers are frequently out of date and might not contain our Omnibus packages. An example of this are the Bitnami packages in the past couldn't be updated and are now much harder to update than the Omnibus packages. We advise to not use one-click installers but instead start an vanilla Ubuntu 14.04 instance and use the recommended Omnibus package installation. This is almost as quick as a one-click install and you're sure of the latest version and easy upgrades."
While the Omnibus packages are nice, focusing on them and neglect the gitlab-only packages makes life harder for other group of people.
Some of us want to reuse the pgsql/redis instances we are already running. For example, we already have pgsql for redmine and other uses, we don't want another, separate instance. Too bad that standalone packages working with system supplied (debian, centos) packages are non-existent.
We understand the appeal of native packages. There have never been any gitlab-only packages, so I don't think we're able to neglect them. In fact, we've been sponsoring Pirate Praveen to bring native packages to Debian and this is really close at the moment, see http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-deprecated-feedback...
That said. A fresh instance of bitbucket hosted close to our office vs bitbucket? No contest.