# GitLab 331 Hacker News commenters recommended GitLab and 346 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 6 years (41 owners). **Verdict:** Praised for its strong built-in CI/CD, finer access and group structure, and the option to self-host for full control, though many find it bloated, resource-hungry and cluttered. ## Why people recommend it - Excellent, flexible CI/CD (5 comments): "We self-host GitLab and I would fight a migration to GitHub with every fiber of my being. GitLab is just better in pretty much every way. Especially CI/CD." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137986)) "The platform itself is quite solid, and GitLab CI is extremely straightforward but allows for a lot of complexity if you need it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46950608)) "Anyone who has ever used Gitlab, or dare my foul mouth say Jenkins, has experienced a better system than Github actions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46066863)) - Self-hosting gives you control (6 comments): "If you're a big company, you can afford having one engineer spend one or two days per year to maintain your self-hosted GitLab or Forgejo." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49379197)) "The key thing that drove our decision to self host gitlab was that WE were the ones in control of when things happened." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334133)) "a better way is to self host or use alternatives such as Codeberg or GitLab which at least you can self host your own" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46950689)) - Solid, reliable core functionality (5 comments): "The platform itself is quite solid, and GitLab CI is extremely straightforward but allows for a lot of complexity if you need it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46950608)) "Gitlab works fine for me. Been using it at work for a few years and recently moved all my personal repos there" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097205)) "I’ve been running an SMB trending mid market out of gitlab for the greater part of a year with no issues." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48454296)) - Better groups and access control (3 comments): "GL has better access granularity, better docs, better integrations, and you can clearly see the UI received a lot of attention" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49331916)) "it's better in terms of organisational structure (you can have one, including access and secret inheritance)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48278679)) "Gitlab is so nice for this. You can group repos together so it is harder to lose track of stale projects." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48214705)) ## What people warn about - Bloated and resource hungry (4 comments): "Gitlab has gotten very bloated and despite disabling a number of services in the config, it continues to require increasingly more compute and RAM" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134435)) "if you have the hardware for it and don't mind bit of bloat but all the needed features in one package" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46310957)) "They're going full-in on AI and each new release is more cluttered with useless features and requires more and more resources to run smoothly." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49484793)) - Cluttered, half-finished features (4 comments): "GitLab would benefit massively if they went back and deleted all of the crap they added during their "feature checkbox craze" years." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224282)) "It hits every feature checkbox, but they aren't well integrated, and they are kind of half way done." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45972205)) "for every single problem I found, there was an open issue always at least 4-7 years old that was just being shuffled around by managers adding and removing random labels" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48105239)) - Confusing or worse UI (3 comments): "The new UI is terrible, and the most important change they've done this year is ... drum roll ... renaming merge requests as "work items"" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48105420)) "while I don't like the way pages are organized for projects, I only really interact with the PR page and that is laid out well" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45920092)) "Using Gitlab or Sourcehut is painful. I'm glad they both exist but the UI, in my opinion, is not as good as Github." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46881020)) - Complex to self-host and maintain (4 comments): "We used to host a GitLab instance in our enterprise. As a sysadmin that used that only occasionally, let me tell you, it took me a hundred times the time to figure out how to do something than actually doing it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46745214)) "ooh boy is a private gitlab server complicated. Omnibus installation helps manage that, but if you outgrow it you're in for a complicated time." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535421)) "even when we bought SaaSes (e.g., GitLab)... I still needed to spend significant time on the recurring manual steps of backup processes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708933)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [GitHub](https://hackerapproved.com/p/github.md): 764 recommend - [Forgejo](https://hackerapproved.com/p/forgejo.md): 380 recommend - [Codeberg](https://hackerapproved.com/p/codeberg.md): 331 recommend - [Gitea](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gitea.md): 195 recommend - [Tangled](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tangled.md): 127 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://about.gitlab.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "GitLab", https://hackerapproved.com/p/gitlab/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).