Leading enterprises are shifting away from disjointed DevOps setups to adopt platforms that provide comprehensive, unified capabilities in one place. GitLab stands out in the software development sphere by eliminating toolchain sprawl and streamlining development, security, and operations. From AI-powered automation to enterprise agile planning, GitLab delivers a superior user experience and significant ROI. All of this is done while safeguarding your intellectual property and ensuring compliance across the board. Let’s explore how GitLab’s comprehensive DevSecOps platform compares to GitHub as a developer tool.
Reduce Toolchain Sprawl
What impact do multiple software development and deployment tools have on your total cost of ownership and manageability?
Unlike GitHub’s reliance on a patchwork of multiple point solutions and custom integrations, GitLab brings all DevSecOps capabilities into one application with a unified data store and superior user experience. The business impact is a reduction of developer cognitive load so they can produce higher quality code, make fewer mistakes, and ship better, more secure software faster. Furthermore, GitLab enables customers who want the flexibility to use a “good enough” tool for most jobs with the capacity to use a “best-in-class” tool when needed. GitLab’s platform can help them do this while maintaining best practices baseline of code quality and security across every project. By reducing toolchain sprawl, GitLab enables DevSecOps best practices, allowing companies to spend less on internal tooling maintenance, automate manual tasks, and free up resources to be redeployed for value-driving feature development.
Customer Proof Point:
We were spending too much time and budget procuring and supporting our toolchain, which had grown to 12 tools. We needed to minimize toolchain maintenance and support as much as possible so our teams could focus on actually creating new feature delivery and not just taking care of all these different tools. Indirectly, it’s a benefit for the whole business. That’s what it’s all about, really — how to be as efficient as possible to get features out to customers.”
– Mark Portofe
Director of Platform Engineering, CARFAX
Analyst Proof Point:
“The types of DevSecOps elements GitLab is integrating – SAST, DAST, code quality analysis, etc. – are in step with the tools identified as most critical in our VotE survey data.” This proves GitLab understands the customer and market needs and is proactively releasing new tooling to meet these needs.
Analyst Proof Point:
According to a Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study commissioned by GitLab, investing in GitLab Ultimate helped interviewed customers make their software development and security efforts more efficient, creating a total return of investment of 427%, with a less than six-month payback period.
AI Throughout the Software Development Lifecycle
How does your DevOps tool leverage AI throughout the software development lifecycle?
Unlike GitHub, GitLab is built as a comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform with AI-assisted workflows integrated across the software development lifecycle. Only possible with a single DevSecOps platform built on a unified data store, GitLab’s user experience increases developer productivity and improves cycle time rather than focusing only on the initial stages of code creation.
Data Proof Point: 2023 Global DevSecOps Report – The State of AI in Software Development
AI should not be limited to code generation. Only 25% of a developer’s time is spent on code creation – the remaining 75% is spent on all other tasks.
Privacy-First, Transparent, & Best-In-Class AI
How do your DevOps AI capabilities protect your company’s IP?
Different LLMs have different strengths, so setting up your AI architecture with multiple models for specific use cases can be a path to success. However, it’s important to ensure that DevOps providers are transparent about the LLMs they utilize for their AI features as well as details about where the LLMs are hosted.
GitLab Duo features aren’t powered by a single model. We’ve built GitLab Duo with the flexibility to use the model that provides the best result for each use case. We continue our emphasis on transparency by clearly identifying the models powering GitLab Duo features in our publicly available documentation.
Data Proof Point: 2023 Global DevSecOps Report – The State of AI in Software Development
Privacy matters. 95% of executive respondents said privacy and protection of intellectual property are important when evaluating an AI tool or feature. 79% of respondents said they are concerned about AI tools having access to private information or intellectual property.
Stronger, More Integrated Security
How does your DevOps tool provide core capabilities in security scanning and compliance management?
Unlike GitHub, our security capabilities are integrated end-to-end for the development workflow from push to production. GitLab has more comprehensive security scanning because GitHub lacks key capabilities, such as DAST, Container Scanning, API security, compliance management, security policy management. Having these tools natively in our DevSecOps platform helps customers more efficiently manage vulnerabilities, improve code quality, and reduce the risk of exposing customers to security issues.
Customer Proof Point:
Dunelm needed a platform that could build pipelines seamlessly, and had security built in from the onset. By using GitLab to improve security processes throughout the software development lifecycle, Dunelm accelerated deployments by 7x – from 10-20 deployments per week to 75-85.
Compliance & More Precise Policy Management
Does your DevOps tool enable security, compliance, and development teams to work closely on Governance together?
GitLab offers a comprehensive governance solution; GitHub does not. Unlike GitHub which has no controls to prevent scanning from being disabled at the project level, GitLab allows for separation of duties between developers and the security/compliance teams so these requirements can be enforced across all of an organization’s projects. Unlike GitHub’s inflexible rules, GitLab’s policy editor allows teams to customize approval rules to tailor them to each organization’s compliance requirements, enabling companies to reduce risk.
Customer Proof Point:
Compliance is a critical issue for Lockheed Martin. Using GitLab’s compliance framework to enforce software quality and automation to make releases and dependency management more efficient has led to 80x faster pipeline builds, with 90% less time spent on system maintenance.
Analyst Proof Point:
“GitLab’s strengths lie in its ability to tightly integrate security with its own development environment — it can restrict components that don’t meet guidelines and can be configured to require merge request approvals when there are vulnerabilities or denied licenses.”
Security Automation & Governance Guardrails
How does your current DevOps tool automate guardrails to ensure security for your production environment?
GitHub lacks system-wide governance capabilities. Unlike GitHub, GitLab’s security features allow you to set granular policies and rules that automate compliance, enabling you to secure the software supply chain. Our security automation allows your developers to minimize manual repetitive tasks so they can focus on deep, value generating work. With GitLab, developers have the freedom to move quickly with the governance guardrails that security and compliance teams require for best practices across the entire company.
Customer Proof Point:
HackerOne’s engineering team saved four to five hours a day per engineer by consolidating the work previously spent on deployment testing.
Metrics & Visibility
How do you currently get real-time unified metric visibility into your entire product development lifecycle with your current DevOps tool setup?
Unlike GitHub, GitLab is built with one unified data store, uniquely providing analytics to measure efficiency and productivity for the entire software development lifecycle all in one place without the need to integrate and maintain additional products.
Customer Proof Point:
The team at Chorus credits GitLab for helping them improve their feature cycle analytics. By having test results, security reviews, performance tests, the code climate and everything in the merge requests, Chorus has been able to move quickly.
Enterprise Agile Planning & Value Stream Management
Does your DevOps tool have built-in enterprise portfolio management?
Unlike GitHub’s limited portfolio management capabilities, GitLab gives the ability to plan across the entire organization integrated directly into the platform. GitLab provides the best of Jira’s capabilities directly into our DevSecOps platform.
Customer Proof Point:
Iron Mountain sees GitLab as an important part of Enterprise Architecture and Platforms’ enablement of Agile methods and helpful to the company’s evolution to DevOps. GitLab Ultimate SaaS does the maintenance, so developers can focus on development, reducing 20 hours of onboarding time per project and around $150,000 in cost savings per year. “GitLab has provided us with the foundation and platform to enable our scaled Agile framework. We are able to collaborate within our Enterprise IT teams and our key stakeholders.”
– Hayelom Tadesse
Vice President of Enterprise Technology, Iron Mountain
Customer Proof Point:
A multinational financial service customer wanted to drive greater efficiency by integrating an Enterprise Agile Planning solution with the rest of their software development practices. They chose GitLab Dedicated over GitHub AE because it met their security and compliance requirements while also enabling them to eliminate duplicate tools, increase operational efficiency, and accelerate their move to the cloud, migrating thousands of business users from Jira to GitLab’s DevSecOps platform.
Analyst Proof Point:
GitLab is featured as a Challenger in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (EAPT), and GitHub is not even a vendor listed. “GitLab offers features in value stream delivery and to enhance delivery efficiency. The vendor has been quick to introduce small features to address different transformation needs in various stages of working, team forming, visibility, values, and outcomes.”
Multicloud & No Vendor Lock-In
Does your DevOps tool have commercial relationships that create a barrier to multi-cloud adoption?
Unlike GitHub’s clear commercial and product bias towards Azure, GitLab is cloud agnostic. This helps organizations avoid being locked in to a single vendor and de-risks their multi-cloud strategy.
Customer Proof Point:
With GitLab, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has embraced cloud technology and has automated manual processes. In migrating to GitLab, the team moved 1,500 projects, over 30 organizations, 500 users, and 50GB of data in less than four weeks. “GitLab helps us with multi cloud deployments. We can deploy runners in any infrastructure, and we’re currently using them to deploy to AWS and GCP. Deploying to the cloud has been simple, and in the year we’ve been using GitLab, we’re in a good position to meet our goal of moving to the cloud.”
– Caio Trevisan
Head of DevOps Enablement, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank
Analyst Proof Point:
“After a lengthy run of Office purchases starting in the 1990s, and after that subscriptions that continue today, Microsoft is once again lining itself up with a set of products that will have intrinsic value as a collection of related solutions, which will likely set customers up for another decade or two of commitments to Microsoft’s product portfolio.”
Open Source & potential to co-create with customers
Is your DevOps tool open source?
Despite its use in the open source community, GitHub is closed source. Unlike GitHub, GitLab is open core, enabling customers to develop DevSecOps platform capabilities that meet their specific needs. This creates a faster pace of innovation and enables all our customers to contribute capabilities to the DevSecOps platform with a clear and influenceable roadmap.
Customer Proof Point:
Compliance is a critical issue for Lockheed Martin. Using GitLab’s compliance framework to enforce software quality and automation to make releases and dependency management more efficient has led to 80x faster pipeline builds, with 90% less time spent on system maintenance.
– Rick Carey
Group Chief Technology Officer, UBS
Proof Point: GitLab community contributions
Thanks to our open core model, all GitLab customers can contribute DevSecOps capabilities to our platform. For example, in 2022, more than 3,300 contributions were made from 760 customers. These additions from our community help improve our functionality, driving us towards the goal of becoming best-in-class in every part of the software development lifecycle.
Get Started with GitLab
Reducing toolchain sprawl can maximize your development velocity, enhance security posture, and cut operational inefficiencies. GitLab offers a purpose-built platform that scales with your team, integrates security, and provides the visibility enterprise organizations need. It empowers businesses to deliver secure, high-quality software without the burden of managing disconnected tools. If your team is ready to unify your DevOps lifecycle with GitLab, contact SPK today.
