Reduce time to value with an integrated product

for the complete DevOps life-cycle

This page lists all the features available in GitLab. Features are grouped per solution; a solution is either a phase of the DevOps life-cycle or a quality attribute of GitLab.

Not all features are available in all versions. Each feature has icons next to it to indicate if it is available in Community Edition (CE), Enterprise Edition Starter (EES), and/or Enterprise Edition Premium (EEP). To compare the versions please see our product page.

Phases of the DevOps life-cycle

Quality attributes of GitLab

Plan

Regardless of your process, GitLab provides powerful planning tools to keep everyone synchronized.

Group-level milestones

CE EES EEP

Create and manage milestones across projects, from the group level. View all the issues for the milestone you’re currently working on across multiple projects.

Documentation

Powerful Issue Tracker

CE EES EEP

Quickly set the status, assignee or milestone for multiple issues at the same time or easily filter them on any properties. See milestones and issues across projects.

Documentation

Due dates for individual issues

CE EES EEP

In GitLab, you can set a due date for individual issues. This is very convenient if you have small tasks with a specific deadline.

Documentation

Move issues between projects

CE EES EEP

You can move issues between projects in GitLab. All links, history and comments will be copied and the original issue will reference the newly moved issue. This makes working with multiple issue trackers much easier.

Documentation

Issue Boards

CE EES EEP

GitLab has Issue Boards, each list of an Issue Board is based on a label that exists in your issue tracker. The Issue Board will therefore match the state of your issue tracker in a user-friendly way.

Feature details

Group Issue Boards

EEP

Issue boards scoped at the group level, so that you can view issues in all projects of that group.

Documentation

Create new issues from the Issue Board

CE EES EEP

With GitLab Issue Boards, you can create issues directly from the board and assign multiple labels allowing them to appear on multiple boards.

Documentation

Construct Issue Boards around issue labels

CE EES EEP

An Issue Board is based on its project's label structure, therefore, it applies the same descriptive labels to indicate placement on the board. GitLab issues can appear on multiple issues and they still have meaning without the context of a particular board.

Documentation

Add multiple issues to the board

CE EES EEP

From an Issue Board, you can add multiple issues to lists in the board by selecting one or more existing issues.

Documentation

Issue Boards with Milestones

EES EEP

Filter an Issue Board based on a milestone to review a sprint.

Documentation

Issue Board Focus Mode

EES EEP

Get more information at a time with the Issue Board focus mode, which removes all unnecessary elements from the screen to show your Issue Boards.

Documentation

Multiple Issue Boards

EES EEP

Large companies often have hundreds of different projects, all with different moving parts at the same time. GitLab Enterprise Edition allows for multiple Issue Boards for a single project so you can to plan, organize, and visualize a workflow for a feature or product release. Multiple Issue Boards are particularly useful for large projects with more than one team or in situations where a repository is used to host the code of multiple products.

Documentation

Time tracking

CE EES EEP

Time Tracking in GitLab lets your team add estimates and record time spent on issues and merge requests.

Feature details

Confidential Issues

CE EES EEP

Keep your information secure with Confidential Issues. With GitLab, you can create confidential issues visible only for project members with Reporter access level or above.

Documentation

Related issues

EES EEP

Explicitly mark issues as related and track their status.

Documentation

Issue Weights

EES EEP

GitLab lets you manage issues using Agile practices by setting the weight of an issue.

Documentation

Burndown Charts

EES EEP

GitLab provides Burndown Charts as part of Milestones. This allows users to better track progress during a sprint or while working on a new version of their software.

Documentation

Multiple assignees for issues

EES EEP

Assign more than one person to an issue at a time.

Documentation

Mattermost integration

CE EES EEP

Mattermost can be automatically installed and integrated using GitLab Omnibus

Documentation

Automatically close issue(s) when a merge request is merged

CE EES EEP

With GitLab, you can use specific keywords to close one or more issues as soon as a merge request is merged.

Documentation

Enriched Markdown support

CE EES EEP

GitLab uses 'GitLab Flavored Markdown' (GFM). It extends the standard Markdown in a few significant ways to add some useful functionality.

Documentation

Issues and merge requests templates

CE EES EEP

By adding a description template to your MRs, users who create a new issue or merge request can select a template to help them to communicate effectively.

Documentation

Revert specific commits or a merge request from the UI

CE EES EEP

Revert any commit or a single merge request from GitLab's UI, with a click of a button.

Documentation

Create, search and view issues from chat

CE EES EEP

Quickly create, view and search for issues straight from chat.

Documentation

Labels

CE EES EEP

Labels provide an easy way to categorize issues or merge requests based on descriptive titles as ‘bug’, or ‘documentation’.

Documentation

Configurable issue closing pattern

CE EES EEP

Define your own specific keywords to close one or more issues as soon as a merge request is merged.

Documentation

Create

Create, view, and manage code and project data through powerful branching tools.

Commit graph and reporting tools

CE EES EEP

GitLab provides commit graphs and reporting tools about collaborators' work.

Documentation

Preview your changes with Review Apps

CE EES EEP

With GitLab CI/CD you can create a new environment for each one of your branches, speeding up your development process. Spin up dynamic environments for your merge requests with the ability to preview your branch in a live environment.

Feature details

Search files with fuzzy file finder

CE EES EEP

GitLab provides a way to search a file in your repository in one keystroke.

Documentation

Fast-forward merge with option to rebase

CE EES EEP

With this setting at the project level, you can ensure that no merge commits are created and all merges are fast-forwarded. When a fast-forward merge is not possible, the user is given the option to rebase.

Documentation

Squash and merge

EES EEP

Combine commits into one so that main branch has a simpler to follow and revert history.

Documentation

Merge request approvals

EES EEP

When a project requires multiple sign-offs, GitLab Enterprise Edition enables you to make sure every merge request is approved by one or more people. Merge request approvals allow you to set the number of necessary approvals and predefine a list of approvers that will need to approve every merge request in a project, and in-turn improve your code’s quality.

Documentation

Merge Requests

CE EES EEP

Create merge requests and @mention team members to review and safely merge your changes.

Documentation

Merge conflict resolution

CE EES EEP

Preview merge conflicts in the GitLab UI and tell Git which version to use.

Documentation

Cherry picking changes

CE EES EEP

Cherry-pick any commit in the UI by simply clicking the Cherry-Pick button in a merged merge request or a specific commit.

Documentation

Activity Stream

CE EES EEP

View a list of the latest commits, merges, comments, and team members on your project.

Documentation

Custom Notifications

CE EES EEP

Be notified by email, Slack, or ToDos anytime there are changes to an issue or merge request.

Documentation

File Locking

EEP

Working with multiple people on the same file can be a risk. Conflicts when merging a non-text file are hard to overcome and will require a lot of manual work to resolve. With GitLab Enterprise Edition Premium, File Locking helps you avoid merge conflicts and better manage your binary files by preventing everyone, except you, from modifying a specific file or entire directory.

Feature details

Powerful branching

CE EES EEP

A branch in Git contains the entire history that preceeds it. It's also created or moved towards instantly and easily shared.

Documentation

Protected branches

CE EES EEP

Granular permissions for branches you want to protect.

Documentation

Restrict push and merge access to certain users

39 restrict push and merge access to users

EES EEP

Extend the base functionality of protected branches and choose which users can push or merge to a protected branch.

Documentation

Protected tags

CE EES EEP

Granular permissions for tags you want to protect.

Documentation

Project Templates

CE EES EEP

When creating a new project, you can choose to kickstart your project from a predefined template that already has some working example code and CI already configured.

Documentation

Image Discussions

CE EES EEP

Within a commit view or a merge request diff view, and with respect to a specific location of an image, have a resolvable discussion. Have multiple discussions specifying different areas of an image.

Documentation

Lock Discussion

CE EES EEP

Lock down continued discussion in an issue or merge request as a Master role or higher, to prevent further abuse, spam, or unproductive collaboration.

Documentation

First time contributor badge

CE EES EEP

Highlight first-time contributors in a project.

Merge request versions

CE EES EEP

View and compare merge request diffs from the merge request UI.

Documentation

Inline commenting and discussion resolution

CE EES EEP

Code or text review is faster and more effective with inline comments in merge requests. Leave comments and resolve discussions on specific lines of code. In GitLab, Merge Request inline comments are interpreted as a discussion. You can configure your project to only accept merge requests when all discussions are resolved.

Documentation

Container debugging with an integrated web terminal

CE EES EEP

Easily debug your containers in any of your environments using the built-in GitLab Web Terminal. GitLab can open a terminal session directly from your environment if your application is deployed on Kubernetes. This is a very powerful feature where you can quickly debug issues without leaving the comfort of your web browser.

Documentation

Ability to edit all fields of a merge request

CE EES EEP

GitLab Merge Requests are editable by the author, the project’s owners and users with master access. Every field is editable, as well as the target branch.

Documentation

Merge when pipeline succeeds

CE EES EEP

When reviewing a merge request that looks ready to merge but still has one or more CI/CD jobs running, you can set it to be merged automatically when the jobs pipeline succeeds.

Documentation

Work in Progress merge requests (WIP)

CE EES EEP

Prevent merge requests from accidentally being accepted before they’re completely ready by marking them as Work In Progress (WIP). This gives you all the code review power of merge requests, while protecting unfinished work.

Documentation

Verify

Keep strict quality standards for production code with automatic testing and reporting.

Autoscaling CI Runners

CE EES EEP

You can automatically spin up and down VMs to make sure your builds get processed immediately and minimize costs.

Documentation

Comprehensive pipeline graphs

CE EES EEP

Pipelines can be complex structures with many sequential and parallel jobs. To make it a little easier to see what is going on, you can view a graph of a single pipeline and its status.

Documentation

Code Quality

EES EEP

Code Quality reports, available in the merge request widget area, give you an early insight into how the change will affect the health of your code before deciding if you want to accept it.

Documentation

Multi-project pipeline graphs

EEP

With multi-project pipeline graphs you can see how upstream and downstream pipelines are linked together for projects that are linked to others via triggers as part of a more complex design, as it is for micro-services architecture.

Documentation

Environments history

CE EES EEP

Environments history allows you to see what is currently being deployed on your servers, and to access a detailed view for all the past deployments. From this list you can also re-deploy the current version, or even rollback an old stable one in case something went wrong.

Documentation

Customizable path for CI/CD configuration

CE EES EEP

You can define a custom path into your repository for your CI/CD configuration file.

Documentation

Show code coverage rate for your pipelines

CE EES EEP

GitLab is able to parse job output logs and search, via a customizable regex, any information created by tools like SimpleCov to get code coverage. Data is automatically available in the UI and also as a badge you can embedd in any HTML page or publish using GitLab Pages.

Blog post

Auto DevOps

CE EES EEP

Auto DevOps brings DevOps best practices to your project by automatically configuring software development lifecycles by default. It automatically detects, builds, tests, deploys, and monitors applications.

Documentation

Minimal CI/CD configuration

CE EES EEP

GitLab CI/CD requires less configuration for your pipelines than other similar setups like Jenkins.

Feature details

Package

Deploy quickly at massive scale with integrated Docker Container Registry

Built-in Container Registry

CE EES EEP

GitLab Container Registry is a secure and private registry for Docker images. It allows for easy upload and download of images from GitLab CI. It is fully integrated with Git repository management.

Documentation

Release

GitLab's integrated CI/CD allows you to ship code quickly, be it on one -or one thousand servers.

Built-in CI/CD

CE EES EEP

GitLab has built-in Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, for free, no need to install it separately. Use it to build, test, and deploy your website (GitLab Pages) or webapp. The job results are displayed on merge requests for easy access.

Feature details

Deploy from Chat

CE EES EEP

Deploy from one environment (e.g. staging) to any other (e.g. production) from Chat

Documentation

Online visualization of HTML artifacts

CE EES EEP

Access your test reports, code quality and coverage information directly from your browser, with no need to download them locally.

Documentation

Browsable artifacts

CE EES EEP

With GitLab CI you can upload your job artifacts in GitLab itself without the need of an external service. Because of this, artifacts are also browsable through GitLab’s web interface.

Documentation

Scheduled triggering of pipelines

CE EES EEP

You can make your pipelines run on a schedule in a cron-like environment.

Documentation

Environments and deployments

CE EES EEP

GitLab CI is capable of not only testing or building your projects, but also deploying them in your infrastructure, with the added benefit of giving you a way to track your deployments. Environments are like tags for your CI jobs, describing where code gets deployed.

Documentation

Protected runners

CE EES EEP

Protected Runners allow you to protect your sensitive information, for example deployment credentials, by allowing only jobs running on protected branches to access them.

Issue details

Easy creation of Kubernetes clusters on GKE

CE EES EEP

Create a Kubernetes cluster on GKE directly from your project, just connecting your Google Account and providing some information. The cluster can be used also by Auto DevOps to deploy your application.

Issue details

Deploy Boards

EEP

GitLab Enterprise Edition Premium ships with Deploy Boards offering a consolidated view of the current health and status of each CI environment running on Kubernetes. The status of each pod of your latest deployment is displayed seamlessly within GitLab without the need to access Kubernetes.

Documentation

Canary Deployments

EEP

GitLab Enterprise Edition Premium can monitor your Canary Deployments when deploying your applications with Kubernetes.

Documentation

Automatic Retry for Failed CI Jobs

CE EES EEP

You can specify a retry keyword in your .gitlab-ci.yml file to make GitLab CI/CD retry a job for a specific number of times before marking it as failed.

Documentation

Pipelines security

CE EES EEP

The ability of running CI/CD pipelines on protected branches is checked against a set of security rules that defines if you’re allowed or not. It includes creating new pipelines, retrying jobs, and perform manual actions.

Documentation

Configure

Configure your applications and infrastructure.

Environment-specific secret variables

EEP

Limit the environment scope of a secret variable by defining which environments it can be available for.

Documentation

Group-level secret variables

CE EES EEP

Define variables at the group level and use them in any project in the group.

Documentation

Monitor

Automatically monitor metrics so you know how any change in code impacts your production environment.

Application performance monitoring

CE EES EEP

GitLab collects and displays performance metrics for deployed apps, leveraging Prometheus. Developers can determine the impact of a merge and keep an eye on their production systems, without leaving GitLab.

Documentation

GitLab server monitoring

CE EES EEP

GitLab comes out of the box enabled for Prometheus monitoring with extensive instrumentation, making it easy to ensure your GitLab deployment is responsive and healthy.

Documentation

Scalability

GitLab has been battle-tested to scale to over 1,000,000 users on GitLab.com.

Database load balancing for PostgreSQL

EEP

“Distribute read-only queries among multiple PostgreSQL database servers and reduce the load on the primary database to increase responsiveness.”

Documentation

Subgroups: groups within groups

CE EES EEP

Create groups within groups to easily manage large amounts of people and projects

Feature details

Object storage for artifacts

EEP

Artifacts are stored on Object Storage (Amazon S3)

Documentation

Object storage for LFS

EEP

LFS files can be stored on Object Storage (Amazon S3)

Documentation

Globally distributed cloning with GitLab Geo (Beta)

EEP

When development teams are spread across two or more geographical locations, but their GitLab instance is in a single location, fetching and cloning large repositories can take a long time. Built for distributed teams, GitLab Geo allows for read-only mirrors of your GitLab instance, reducing the time it takes to clone and fetch large repos and improving your collaboration process.

Feature details

Availability

Support for High Availability deployments and Disaster Recovery, means your development environment and knowledge is safe in our hands.

Highly Available setups

CE EES EEP

For mission critical releases, you cannot afford downtime. Split your app servers, database, etc., into multiple instances and work in read-only mode during backups.

Documentation

Basic backup and restore mechanism without additional software

CE EES EEP

GitLab provides a simple command line interface to backup or restore your whole installation, and is flexible enough to fit your needs.

Documentation

PostgreSQL HA

EEP

Easily set up a highly available Postgres cluster with automated failover (beta)

Documentation

Disaster Recovery (Alpha)

EEP

Fail over in minutes to another data-center

Documentation

Support for High Availability

EEP

To avoid downtime, GitLab Enterprise Edition Premium offers support for High Availability (HA). A Service Engineer will help you identify your specific HA needs and map out an architecture.

Documentation

Compliance

Comply with licensing, legal, and other requirements using tools built into GitLab.

Granular user roles and flexible permissions

CE EES EEP

Manage access and permissions with five different user roles and settings for external users. Set permissions according to people's role, rather than either read or write access to a repository. Don't share the source code with people that only need access to the issue tracker.

Documentation

Multiple approvals in code review

EES EEP

In GitLab, to ensure strict code review, you can require a specific number of approvals on a merge request by different users before being able to merge it. You can undo an approval by removing it after the fact.

Documentation

Push rules

EES EEP

Reject new code and commits that don’t comply with company policy.

Documentation

Email all users of a project, group, or entire server

EES EEP

An admin can email groups of users based on project or group membership, or email everyone using the GitLab instance. This is great for scheduled maintenance or upgrades.

Documentation

Limit project size at a global, group, and project level

EES EEP

Ensure that disk space usage is under control.

Documentation

Omnibus package supports log forwarding

EES EEP

Forward your logs to a central system.

Documentation

Lock project membership to group

EES EEP

Group owners can prevent new members from being added to projects within a group.

Documentation

Restrict SSH Keys

CE EES EEP

Control the technology and key length of SSH keys used to access GitLab

Documentation

LDAP group sync

EES EEP

GitLab Enterprise Edition gives your Admin’s the ability to automatically sync groups and manage SSH-keys, permissions, and authentication, so you can focus on building your product, not configuring your tools.

Documentation

LDAP group sync filters

EEP

GitLab Enterprise Edition Premium gives more flexibility to syncronise with LDAP based on filters, meaning you can leverage LDAP attributes to map GitLab permissions.

Documentation

Audit Logs

EEP

To maintain the integrity of your code, GitLab Enterprise Edition gives admins the ability to view any modifications made within the GitLab server in an advanced audit log system, so you can control, analyze and track every change.

Documentation

Auditor users

EEP

Auditor users are users who are given read-only access to all projects, groups, and other resources on the GitLab instance.

Documentation

GPG Signed Commits

CE EES EEP

Sign commits and prove that a commit was performed by a certain user.

Documentation

Reject unsigned commits

EEP

GitLab Enterprise Edition Premium allows you to enforce GPG signatures by reject unsigned commits.

Documentation

Protected secret variables

CE EES EEP

You can mark a secret variable as “protected” to make it available only to jobs running on protected branches, therefore only authorized users can get access to it.

Documentation

Git has smaller size requirements

CE EES EEP

A single repository in Git is typically a number of times smaller than the same repository in SVN.

Documentation

Security

Secure your most precious data and assets on GitLab confidently.

Kerberos user authentication

EES EEP

Authenticate users with Kerberos.

Documentation

Block secret file push

EES EEP

Block important or secret files from being accidentally pushed to a live repository with push rules.

Documentation

Services

We provide various services to help get your GitLab instance running and help it run smoothly.

4-hour support response time

EEP

Get the support you need. Our team of highly-skilled support engineers are available to help with all of your support needs.

Feature details

24/7 emergency support

EEP

GitLab responds within 30 minutes to any emergency.

Feature details

Live upgrade assistance

EEP

Schedule an upgrade time with GitLab. We’ll join a live screen share to help you through the process to ensure there aren’t any surprises.

Feature details

Next business day support

Receive support within a single business day.

Learn more about our support package

Wiki

Easily create documentation and related content for your projects in GitLab's powerful, Git-powered Wikis.

Integrated Git-powered wikis

CE EES EEP

A separate system for documentation called Wiki, is built right into each GitLab project. Every Wiki is a separate Git repository.

Documentation

Service Desk

Service Desk is helps companies receive and manage external tickets in their issue trackers.

Service Desk

EEP

Allow external users to create issues in your GitLab instance without an account and without access to anything except their issue. Manage tickets from the GitLab interface.

Feature details

Innersourcing

The power and advantages of open source within your organization, without giving away your source code.

Projects

CE EES EEP

Organize your repository into private, internal, or public projects.

Documentation

Innersourcing

CE EES EEP

Internal projects in GitLab allow you to promote innersourcing of your internal repositories.

Blog post

Advanced Global Search

EES EEP

Leverage Elasticsearch for faster, more advanced code search across your entire GitLab instance.

Documentation

Advanced Syntax Search

EES EEP

Use advanced queries for more targeted search results.

Documentation

Contribution Analytics

EES EEP

With contribution analytics you can have an overview for the activity of issues, merge requests and push events of your organization and its members.

Documentation

Integration

Integrate with GitLab using a comprehensive API and built-in integrations with other services.

Export projects

CE EES EEP

GitLab allows you to export your project to other systems.

Documentation

AD / LDAP integration

EES EEP

Sync groups, manage SSH-keys, manage permissions, authentication and more. You can manage an entire GitLab instance through the LDAP / AD integration.

Documentation

A comprehensive API

CE EES EEP

GitLab provides APIs for most features, allowing developers to create deeper integrations with the product.

Documentation

Create and remove admins based on an LDAP group

EES EEP

Use LDAP groups to create or remove admins from your GitLab instance.

Documentation

Integrate with Atlassian Crowd

CE EES EEP

Authenticate users with Atlassian Crowd.

Documentation

Multiple LDAP server support (compatible with AD)

EES EEP

Integrate with multiple LDAP servers for use when authenticating users.

Documentation

Group webhooks

EES EEP

Add webhooks by default to all projects in a group so you can ensure they are present everywhere.

Documentation

Remote repository mirroring

EES EEP

Mirror a repository from elsewhere on your local server.

Documentation

Display merge request status for builds on Jenkins CI

EES EEP

Integrate with Jenkins CI and display the merge request build status directly from the merge request.

Documentation

Export issues as CSV

EES EEP

Issues can be exported as CSV from GitLab and are sent to your default notification email as an attachment.

Documentation

Built for containers and Docker

CE EES EEP

GitLab ships with its own Container Registry, Docker CI Runner and is ready for a complete CI/CD container workflow. There is no need to install, configure and maintain additional plugins.

Cloud Native

CE EES EEP

GitLab and its CI/CD is Cloud Native, purpose built for the cloud model. GitLab ships with Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes support out of the box.

Run CI/CD jobs on Windows

CE EES EEP

GitLab Runner supports Windows operating system and can run jobs natively on this platform. You can automate build, test and deploy for Windows based projects leveraging powershell or batch files.

Documentation

Run CI/CD jobs on macOS

CE EES EEP

GitLab Runner supports OSX operating system and can run jobs natively on this platform. You can automate build, test and deploy for OSX based projects leveraging shell scripts and command line tools.

Documentation

Run CI/CD jobs on Linux ARM

CE EES EEP

GitLab Runner supports Linux operating system on ARM architectures and can run jobs natively on this platform. You can automate build, test and deploy for Linux ARM based projects leveraging shell scripts and command line tools.

Documentation

Run CI/CD jobs on FreeBSD

CE EES EEP

GitLab Runner supports FreeBSD operating system and can run jobs natively on this platform. You can automate build, test and deploy for FreeBSD based projects leveraging shell scripts and command line tools.

Documentation

Multiple integrations

CE EES EEP

GitLab can integrate with Authentication and Authorization (LDAP / AD) mechanisms, multiple 3rd party services, CI/CD, and other tools such as ALM, PLM, Agile and Automation tools.

Documentation

Custom Git Hooks

CE EES EEP

Leverage the power of Git Hooks and chain them together to fire off custom scripts when certain actions occur on the repository. If the commit is declined or an error occurs during the Git hook check, the error message of the hook will be present in GitLab’s UI. GitLab supports all types of hooks.

Documentation

JIRA integration

CE EES EEP

To ensure that developers in GitLab and project managers in JIRA remain in tune, GitLab integrates with JIRA and provides the necessary tooling to fill that gap.

Feature details

JIRA development panel

EEP

View GitLab repository information and navigate to GitLab from the JIRA development panel

Documentation

Git LFS support

CE EES EEP

Manage large files such as audio, video and graphics files with the help of Git LFS.

Documentation

Various authentication mechanisms

CE EES EEP

GitLab can integrate with most of the authentication and authorization providers.

Documentation

Import

Import your code, tickets, issues and other data from other solution into GitLab

The most comprehensive import feature set

CE EES EEP

GitLab can import projects and issues from more sources (GitHub, BitBucket, Google Code, FogBugz, Gitea and from any git URL) than GitHub or any other VCS. We even have you covered for your move from SVN to Git with comprehensive guides and documentation.

Documentation

Ease of migration from other providers

CE EES EEP

GitLab lets you easily migrate all repos, issues and merge request data from your previous provider.

Documentation

Import from GitLab.com

CE EES EEP

Import projects from GitLab.com to a private GitLab instance.

Documentation

Open core

GitLab is 'open-core', which provides users with access to the source code and the ability to modify it as they wish.

Choice and flexibility

CE EES EEP

GitLab CE/EE can be installed on physical servers, virtualized servers (dedicated or shared), purpose-built appliances and virtualized appliances. These aren’t available with hosted solutions. Likewise, most on-premises servers can be deployed on a variety of operating systems and there’s more choice of on-premises solutions in general.

Read about the different ways to install GitLab

Access to the server

CE EES EEP

You have complete control of the server/instance, so you can install additional software (intrusion detection, performance monitoring, etc.) and view log files on the server itself. GitLab’s advanced log system means everything gets logged and provides you with easy access to a wealth of log file information.

Documentation

Runs on metal

CE EES EEP

GitLab can run on bare metal servers where you can have control of the disk I/O, CPU, RAM, etc. Scale horizontally without an issue.

Read about the different ways to install GitLab

Run your own software on your instance

CE EES EEP

You are free to run your own software on the instance that GitLab is running on. Have your own intrusion detection system? No problem.

Read about the different ways to install GitLab

Use your configuration management software

CE EES EEP

You can use your choice of configuration management software, from Puppet, Chef, Ansible for quick and straightforward implementation.

Read about the different ways to install GitLab

Use standard Unix tools for maintenance and monitoring

CE EES EEP

Use the tools you know for monitoring and maintenance, whether they’re standard or your own. GitLab doesn’t restrict you.

Read about the different ways to install GitLab

Single package installation

CE EES EEP

Use GitLab’s official repositories or manually download the package to install GitLab in a few steps. All major Linux distributions are supported.

Read about the different ways to install GitLab

Single configuration file

CE EES EEP

All configuration options for administering a GitLab instance are in a single file. Say no to complex setups, your admin will thank you.

Read about the different ways to install GitLab

Access to and ability to modify source code

CE EES EEP

GitLab Enterprise Edition is publicly readable, meaning you can scan or modify the code to meet your security and development needs. The code used by most other providers is proprietary, meaning you cannot edit or view the source code.

Issue details

Containment

CE EES EEP

Containing your company’s IP behind the company’s firewall gives you protection from unauthorized access. Learn from the lessons of Code Space.

Lessons from Code Space

Control

EEP

Take control of maintenance downtime, don’t be at the mercy of your hosting provider. Control how and where your code is backed up and stored.

You decide when you upgrade

CE EES EEP

GitLab releases a new version each month and lets you choose when to upgrade.

Learn how to upgrade your GitLab instance

Easy upgrade process

CE EES EEP

Using our official Linux repositories or the official Docker image, upgrading GitLab is a breeze.

Learn how to upgrade your GitLab instance

Retrieval

CE EES EEP

Getting your IP back from cloud vendors that store data in proprietary formats can be a costly and lengthy process. No such trouble with GitLab CE/EE.

In good company

CE EES EEP

GitLab is the most adopted on-premises solution for developer collaboration, deployed at over 100,000 organizations worldwide.

Community based, users can help shape the product

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GitLab has open issue trackers for almost all of its operations. From GitLab itself to infrastructure and marketing, you can help shape the product.

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Efficiency

GitLab helps you get more done, faster with a deeply integrated feature set.

Cycle Analytics

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GitLab provides a dashboard that lets teams measure the time it takes to go from an idea to production. GitLab can provide this data because it has all the tools built-in: from the idea, to the CI, to code review, to deploy to production.

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Todos

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When a user is mentioned in or assigned to a merge request it will be included in the user Todos, making the development workflow faster and easier to track.

Documentation

Fast page load

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Some other services have faster pageloads than GitLab.com right now, we’re actively working on improving this. Self-hosted instances of GitLab CE/EE will be performant up to tens of thousands of users.

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Create new branches from issues

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In GitLab, you can quickly create a new branch from an issue on the issue tracker. It will include the issue number and title automatically, making it easy to track which branch belongs to which issue.

Documentation

Quick actions

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GitLab provides a convenient way to change metadata of an issue or merge request without leaving the comment field with slash commands.

Documentation

IPv6 ready

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If you host GitLab yourself, IPv6 is supported as long as your underlying provider can support it. GitLab.com on the other hand does not support IPv6 at the moment due to limited provider support.

Read about the different ways to install GitLab

Admin Control

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GitLab Enterprise Edition gives your administrator the ability to automatically sync groups and manage SSH-keys, permissions, and authentication, so you can focus on building your product, not configuring your tools.

Documentation

Conversational Development Index

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Accelerate idea-to-production by identifying areas of improvement in your entire development process. See how you compare to other organizations using GitLab.

Documentation

Based on Git, a distributed VCS

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Git, on which GitLab is built, is fully distributed. Every user has a complete copy of the repository, allowing for much faster access to history, easier branching and an overall better experience.

Documentation

Git is fast

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Git is really fast. Performing a diff, viewing history, committing and merging changes, obtaining any revision and any form of branching is very quick.

Documentation

Responsive-first design

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GitLab is built with a responsive-first design approach. Be it on a desktop, tablet or smartphone, GitLab is optimized to be viewed for the best result.

GitLab.com

GitLab's SaaS solution for teams of any size.

Free CI with Shared or Personal Runners

GitLab.com has shared runners that allow you to use GitLab CI completely free up to 2000 build minutes for private projects and unlimited for public projects. Alternatively, you can set up your own Runner for faster build processing, unlimited build minutes, or special requirements.

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Missing

Features that we would love to have. Contributions are very welcome.

The best place for large open source projects

GitLab is meant to be the best place for any software project. The team behind GitLab is addressing issues that maintainers and contributors to large open source projects are facing, to make it easier to do both.

Blog post

Allow edits from upstream maintainers in branch

In GitHub, when a user opens a pull request from a fork, they are given the option that allows the upstream repository contributors to collaborate with them on their new branch. GitLab allows you to restrict pushes very carefully, but does not have this option.

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Drag and drop tasks

You can change the order of tasks in markdown on GitHub. GitLab does not have this ability, but is considering implementing it.

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SUPPORT file link

Link from new issues to a SUPPORT file, pointing to support resources.

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Verified Committer

Verify that only the author of a commit can push changes to GitLab

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Code Owners

The ability to specify code owners or reviewers in the repository

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Manage JUnit reports created by CI jobs

Many languages use frameworks that automatically run tests on your code and create a report: one example is the JUnit format that is common to different tools. GitLab supports browsing artifacts and you can download reports, but we’re still working on a proper way to integrate them directly into the product.

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Details on duration for each command execution in GitLab CI/CD

Other CI systems show execution time for each single command run in CI jobs, not just the overall time. We’re reconsidering how job output logs are managed in order to add this feature as well.

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Navigate to method/function in a merge request diff

When viewing a merge request diff, navigate directly to a method/function in a changed file.

Issue details

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This page is generated from a public file on GitLab.com — merge requests with improvements are very welcome.