The parent's post aligns with my own experience. I've been using GitLab for 2 years after switching companies and I can't think of anything that is an improvement over GitHub.
I never had any issues GitHub Actions for CI stuff at my previous two companies, both which used it heavily. GitLab CI also works fine, though I struggle to see how anyone could strongly prefer one or the other as my own experience is that they basically work the same. Both basically boil down to some yaml you can use to configure running stuff in docker containers.
The point is that it was GitHub that caught up for some simpler use-cases fairly recently, not the other way around. When I started using GitLab 6 years ago it made GitHub look like a toy where you had to reach for external services like Travis to do anything useful.
Fair enough, but the fact that GitLab was better 6 years ago doesn't do much to help the company right now.
I wasn't using GitLab 6 years ago so I can't comment on that, but I can comment that at least since 2022, I haven't found anything in GitLab that would recommend it over GitHub.
> Fair enough, but the fact that GitLab was better 6 years ago doesn't do much to help the company right now.
I don't think you got the point.
The whole point is that a couple of years ago GitLab was unquestionably the market leader and hands down the best service.
And since then it didn't got worse.
Best case scenario, alternatives like GitHub managed to put together similar offerings. That does not mean GitHub suddenly was the best. Far from it. Again, others in this thread used the term "mediocre" to describe GitHub, and this happens years after GitHub started to try to catch up.
To me, GitLab's CICD is by far the absolute best CICD system around. It has been like this for maybe a decade now. The container-centric approach to build jobs, a domain model for pipelines that is extremely simple and yet misses no usecase at all, UX that's unparalleled to the point that, unlike other CICD systems, doesn't even require a tutorial to get the basics to work... Things are so far apart that it boggles the mind how anyone who has any experience in CICD would even mention GitHub on the same sentence.
GitLab was the absolute best 6 years ago and, in spite of Microsoft's takeover of GitHub and rushing to bridge the gap, it still is. That's the whole point.
the rabbit hole goes deep, but both GitLab and GitHub reached parity around that time. (initially GitLab CI simply did a lot more, then GHA kind of took over with the ability to run multiple parallel workflows, and by arguably feeling a bit newer and having better "official" steps ... the GitLab auto-magic CI was ... always completely meh, IMHO.)
but GitLab kept adding the good stuff that Actions introduced, and it can do a lot of things, and with the Omnibus package it's very easy to self-host. (and upgrades are well supported, etc.) ... and of course GitHub self-hosting is only for enterprise editions.
sure, you can setup one GHA Runner on one VM (and each one one a new one), but that's it. nothing else is supported officially.
I never had any issues GitHub Actions for CI stuff at my previous two companies, both which used it heavily. GitLab CI also works fine, though I struggle to see how anyone could strongly prefer one or the other as my own experience is that they basically work the same. Both basically boil down to some yaml you can use to configure running stuff in docker containers.