GitLab Reviews & Ratings 2026 | Gartner Peer Insights

Name: GitLab
Rating: 4.4 (1442 reviews)

Overview

Product Information on GitLab

Updated 22nd November 2023

What is GitLab?

GitLab is a comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform for software innovation. The GitLab DevSecOps platform includes all capabilities required to deliver secure software faster with a unified data store, including source code management, continuous integration and delivery, agile project and portfolio planning, GitOps, software supply chain security, compliance management, and value stream management. GitLab empowers customers to improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, build high-performing teams, and accelerate cloud transformation to maximize the overall return on software development.

Overall experience with GitLab

ENGINEER

Gov't/PS/ED <5,000 Employees, Education

FAVORABLE

“Impact of GitLab on Automation Efficiency and Streamlining Testing Processes”

4.0

Dec 11, 2025

GitLab has worked well for us as the main place for code reviews, CI, and test reporting, which matters when automation is a first class citizen and not an afterthought. The main value has been shortening the loop from pushing a change to knowing if our API, UI, and regression test suite are green, especially once runners, caching, and job parallelization were set up cleanly.

ENGINEER

50M - 250M USD, Manufacturing

CRITICAL

“Strong Integration and Automation Highlighted Amid Complex Setup and Rising Costs”

3.0

Nov 21, 2025

It's a very powerful platform that allows for strong integration within security and project management. However, this comes with the trade-off that it’s very complex and resource intensive.

Badges

Gartner Peer Insights recognizes vendors who meet or exceed both the market average Overall Experience and the market average User Interest and Adoption score through a Customers’ Choice distinction.

For Market:
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) Tools

About Company

Company Description

GitLab is a comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform for software innovation. As a software delivery platform for development, security, and operations teams, GitLab brings security and compliance to AI-powered workflows throughout the software delivery lifecycle, helping customers deliver secure software faster. GitLab Duo, the company’s suite of AI capabilities, improves team collaboration and reduces the security and compliance risks of AI adoption by bringing the entire software development lifecycle into a single AI-powered application that is privacy-first. With GitLab, customers can visualize their end-to-end value streams, boost developer productivity with out-of-the-box analytics, and secure their software supply chain with SAST, DAST, secret detection, container scanning, and API testing. It enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, and accelerate cloud transformations to maximize the overall return on software development.

Company Details

Company type

Public

Year Founded

2014

Head office location

United States

Number of employees

1001 - 5000

Website

https://about.gitlab.com/

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Key Insights

A Snapshot of What Matters - Based on Validated User Reviews

User Sentiment About GitLab

Reviewer Insights for: GitLab

Deciding Factors: GitLab Vs. Market Average

Performance of GitLab Across Market Features

GitLab Likes & Dislikes

I like that GitLab CI is easy to version and review because the pipeline is defined in a yaml file stored in the repo, so changes to the build and test workflow go through the same merge request process as production code. It's been great for standardizing how we run Playwright and Selenium suites, API tests, and contract checks for consistent container images, environment setup and predictable logs when something flakes. Test artifacts are also a big win for debugging in being able to publish test reports, screenshots, traces, and videos per job makes triage faster than digging through raw console output.

The built in features, especially automation in DevOps, SAST/DAST security protocols, and ease of scalability within our infrastructure.

1. Integrated CI/CD: The fact that the CI/CD pipelines are all seamlessly integrated into the GitLab offering is the killer app in and of itself. Being able to set up all of this through the '.gitlab-ci.yml' configuration file right in the GitLab repository configuration is infinitely better than the way we had to manage Jenkins servers in the past. 2. Code Review & Merge Requests: Code review screens are nicely designed. Features such as in-line commenting and viewing the status of the pipelines in the Merge Request are all excellent ways to facilitate team collaboration. 3. Integrated Container Registry: Docker is a big part of what we do, and being able to store our containers in a registry right in our GitLab installation eliminates the need to manage third-party storage services.

A single runner operation can become its own mini-platform where jobs get stuck, runner capacity planning is a pain, and keeping containers and dependencies stable across upgrades takes a lot of effort (especially once multiple teams pile onto the same fleet). Merge request pipelines are useful, but it's important to understand that they run against the source branch content (not the merged result by default), so there are times I still want merged-result testing to catch integration conflicts early. Also, caching and artifacts are easily misused at first, where cache is best for reusing dependencies, while artifacts are better for passing build outputs between stages and downloading reports later.

It is very complex to set up the service to begin with. The product is very complex and requires established system experience to be competent in. Costs can increase rapidly when expanding across infrastructure.

1. Resource Intensiveness: Since we use a self-managed instance, the process can be very resource-intensive, especially if theres a large set of pipelines running at the same time. 2. Steep Learning Curve: Because this platform does so much, sometimes the UI can be overwhelming for junior developers brought on to the team, as theres too much going on, represented by options on menus, & so on. 3. Debugging CI Pipeline: At times, debugging a syntax error involving CI pipelines can be frustrating; a more interactive experience would be nice for speeding up the process for CI pipelines linting tools.

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Peer Discussions

What Your Peers Are Saying About GitLab

Director of Information Security

Best Practices to create a SBOM with EOS/EOL Timeline to aid vulnerability remediation (currently use GitLab as our pipeline and Nexus repository).

Group Director of Information Security

It's a 5-step process which you will need to correlate for your environment. 1. Integrate dependency scanners (e.g., GitLab's built-in scanner, Trivy, Snyk, OWASP Dependency-Check or your existing Nexus repo) to flag outdated dependencies and use GitLab’s security dashboard to monitor deprecated packages. 2. Set up GitLab CI/CD rules to fail builds if EOL/EOS dependencies are detected and enforce allow/block lists for dependencies using GitLab’s security policies. 3. Configure GitLab to generate reports when a dependency is approaching its EOL and see if you can use GitLab’s webhook integrations to notify security teams via Slack, email, or Jira. 4. Implement dependency auto-updating tools (e.g., Renovate, Dependabot) to replace (identified & manually verified) EOL/EOS components. If no direct upgrade path exists, isolate the outdated component via containerization or sandboxing. 5. Maintain a historical record of all SBOMs and EOL/EOS alerts for compliance audits (ISO 27001, NIST, etc.). Regularly conduct security reviews using GitLab’s security reports.

See Full Discussion

22 Feb 2025465 Views1 Comment

IT Analyst

What has been your experience utilizing GITLAB (not GITHUB) to implement CI/CD for Athena and AWS GLUE, specifically for a process to transfer changes in Athena Views from the development environment to production?

CTO

We have used gitlab CI CD pipelines using terraform for all AWS resources, not athena or glue specifically though.

See Full Discussion

18 May 20231.1k Views1 Comment

GitLab Reviews and Ratings

4.4

(1442 Ratings)

Rating Distribution

5 Star: 49%
4 Star: 47%
3 Star: 4%
2 Star: 0%
1 Star: 0%

Customer Experience

Evaluation & Contracting

4.4

Integration & Deployment

4.6

Service & Support

4.4

Product Capabilities

4.6

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ENGINEER
Gov't/PS/Ed
Education
Review Source
Impact of GitLab on Automation Efficiency and Streamlining Testing Processes
4.0
Dec 11, 2025
GitLab has worked well for us as the main place for code reviews, CI, and test reporting, which matters when automation is a first class citizen and not an afterthought. The main value has been shortening the loop from pushing a change to knowing if our API, UI, and regression test suite are green, especially once runners, caching, and job parallelization were set up cleanly.
Software Engineer
<50M USD
Services (non-Government)
Review Source
The definitive all-in-one DevOps platform that successfully unified our Dev and Ops workflows.
5.0
Jan 13, 2026
GitLab has completely unified our development lifecycle. Previously, we jumped between different tools for repositories and CI/CD. Now, having source code management, pipelines, and container registry in one place has drastically improved the velocity of our team. It is a solid platform, updated very frequently, with excellent documentation. Central hub for our daily engineering work.
IT MANAGER
<50M USD
IT Services
Review Source
GitLab Enhances Collaboration Yet Faces Performance and Usability Challenges for Teams
4.0
Nov 8, 2025
My overall experience with GitLab has been excellent. it plays a crucial role in managing our product lifecycle. GitLab makes it easy to track issues, validate release builds, and collaboration efficiently with developers. The CI/CD pipelines save time during development on customer setups, while merge requests help maintain code quality. It has improved our testing visibilty and release accuracy. Overall, GitLab has enhanced productivity, teamwoprk and the overall efficiency of our QA and development processes.
CLOUD APPLICATION SECURITY ENGINEER
Gov't/PS/Ed
Education
Review Source
Unified Source Control Offers Efficiency While GitLab Users Face Overwhelming Alerts
4.0
Jan 13, 2026
We initially adopted GitLab as a DevSecOps platform to consolidate our source control, CI/CD pipelines, and security scanning into a single system. In practice, GitLab provided strong value by centralizing the diaspora of these disciplines, however, it required us to accept the platform’s opinions around how DevSecOps should work. When aligned with that view, it is powerful; when it's not, there is friction.
It Security & Risk Management Associate
50M-1B USD
Consumer Goods
Review Source
The Definitive DevSecOps Platform for Securing the Supply Chain on the GCP
5.0
Jan 27, 2026
Transitioning to GitLab Ultimate has fundamentally shifted our posture from "reactive patching" to "proactive supply chain security". As an organisation heavily invested in the Google ecosystem, the ability to consolidate source code management, CI/CD and security scanning into a single platform has significantly reduced our operational overhead.

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