Gitlab, for all it's flaws fits so much better in "regular" company/organization projects. It's more in line on what people involved in software dev and all the tasks around it have as a mental model and less of a "open source dev social network" like Github tried to be almost from the start and lately got Microsofted. An lets not even bring the CI / Github Actions topic..
Isn't being able to self host it on your company network a big important feature? Like for all the non-public branches and projects you keep internal. Gives you the same UX for everything.
Especially judging by whats happening in the gaming industry right now. Mass layoffs everywhere from once leading lights in the industry, now acquired by big business and having to succumb to broad budget cuts.
the greatest wealth concentration and inequity in american history, blatant corruption and nepotism
an out of control, bipartisan oligarchy
The majority of HN has been on the winning side of this equation, benefiting greatly from the rise of the computer, internet, and now Ai. This is not most people, we forget about them, we tell them it's their own fault when it is not. The game is not fair, it's rigged for most humans.
What about OP's comment rings communistic, or even political to you? Or is it the link between information control and wealth consolidation that you find controversial?
Would also like a write-up. People assume it's just because of GitHub outages, but GitHub is slightly worse in every aspect, so for big projects and organisations it compounds to being quite messy to manage and operate.
GitLab is thought-out to support larger groups with more complex pipelines, and while it's got it's own set of quirks, it doesn't begin to compare, GitHub in contrast seems like a toy forge for toy projects.
And of course many people self-host which changes a lot of the equation (which you can also do with GitHub, but not for free - and FWIW our self-hosted premium gitlab has about an hour a day downtime, which we've been told by the team responsible is an unavoidable side-effect of backing up gitlab).
I was responsible for administering a self hosted GitLab instance for a medium sized company and our backups never required downtime. The built in backup command doesn't require downtime but also isn't a consistent point in time snapshot (specifically because the instance keeps running while the backup is being taken). If they've decided they need one for some reason, stopping GitLab is certainly the easiest way, but not the only way of accomplishing that goal, but that'll be true of any self-hosted forge, including GitHub.
What makes it more complicated than doing a Git push against two remotes? Assuming that one of those is used for collaboration and the other is just a mirror.
I haven't used Dagger but it looks like a fundamentally different design from traditional CI engines, so some people might have issues moving to it.
I recommend Drone.io or WoodpeckerCI for hosting your own CI. It's a very good design; very simple, easy to run, easy to use, integrates with most systems you'd want to, abstracts away components rather than tightly integrating them, and you don't need to be a programmer to use it. So basically the opposite of Dagger.
GitHub is such a mess. They seem to be doing everything and nothing. GitLab is 100x better, in terms of DX. While I still have a soft spot for GH, its frustrating to use it when GL exists.
I moved my projects over to GitLab about a year ago.
GitLab's model is different - at least it was when I moved over to it. They charged for public repositories and gave you a free private ones as a sampler for trying out the platform. That approach is far less prone to getting overrun by millions of slopositories.
GitLab never tried to be the social media of software development. Theirs is a much simpler, classical model - one of the reasons I switched to them: you pay them money, they provide you services for that money.
> GitLab will eventually just get overran with 24/7 agents spewing from their AI Slop Cannons
That's fine. GitLab offers self-hosted solutions where companies run the service in their own infrastructure and limit who has access to it. The same cannot be said by GitHub, though.
That isn't true. Self hosted Github exists, and has for years now. From what I hear (from a friend who had to administer his company's instance) it's not a good product by any means, but it does exist.
I always found it wierd that people flocked to github. The app sucks, if I have to use it for work it infuriates me at nearly every turn with its sad excuse for UI. People like free sh*.
As for gitlab...yuck. But whatever. Most of the dev tool space is really just "sh* we have to put up with now", none of it is any good, all of it is dated from the early aughts, and taken as a whole is even worse because none of it works together.
While software development itself got better in the last ten years these tools stayed the same or got worse (enshittification). And this is part of why folks are self hosting.
The other part is that AI is destroying the Internet and its time to pack your bags anyway. The smart people already have.
You broadcasted your negative feedback but it seems you had no positive remarks to give. If you feel everything is so bad, would you mind sharing what tolerable alternatives are there to GitHub and GitLab?
> mind sharing what tolerable alternatives are there to GitHub and GitLab?
Not the op, and while your criticism of their negativity may be somewhat justified, the ask is kind of silly. There are a bunch of well known alternatives:
A software project either is or isn't open source. Gitlab CE is source-available (here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab) with an MIT license, which is a permissive open-source license.
Gitlab CE is open-source. There exist versions of Gitlab with features that require payment. This does not mean that Gitlab (the product) is not open-source; it means that Gitlab (the company) has a core product which is open-source, and then sustains its development through the sale of licenses to product tiers beyond that.
Good. I want everyone to do this. I want to see the downfall of Microsoft. Time and again they've proved that anything they touch can't be trusted nor reliable. I am tired of this. They even bully their users - on Mac OS, GitHub desktop doesn't respect the word "no". It installs all kinds of helpers and acts like borderline spyware. Someone created an issue about it on Github and the MS employees told them to fuck off in corporate[1]
I am even considering hosting my own GIT server myself. Some of our deployments got affected multiple times in the last 6 months alone we were really caught off-guard. Thankfully our clients were understanding of the GitHub outages. But, this should not be the baseline. Reliability should not be the cost of doing business.
Thanks for a good laugh, FOSS in 2026 is nothing without the money of big corporations, including Microsoft.
Everyone spent years talking against GPL, business friendly licenses like MIT and Apache were the way of the future, not viral and co.
Now we are here, most projects have their key contributors working at corporations like Microsoft, or gladly getting their acquisition money to pay the VCs, embrace your business friendly licenses.
I'm hosting Forgejo for my homelab and couldn't be happier. I have everything running in containers with dind for CI/CD. Most of my workflows just worked with minimal changes. YMMV and this is far from an enterprises' needs but it's working great so far for my needs.
Every other free service would die nearly instantly, so maybe only want useful things to move to other services.
>I am even considering hosting my own GIT server myself.
It's mostly a good idea.... but, with the current security apocalypse we seem to be under making sure your own shit doesn't get pwned is a full time job. The level of security hostility on the internet recently has reached numbers I've never seen before. RCE's dropping about every day, more targeted scans than I've ever seen in my life, swarms of AI bots breaking into services.
Github desktop is such a hot mess that I instead choose to continue to suffer with SourceTree. Sourcetree annoys me for reasons I still cannot articulate after a decade, but it at least tends to actually work without being too intrusive as far as updating, doesn't randomly derp out on credentials, and is super handy when trying to visualize janky branch patterns of dev teams.
How so? I used both at work and they're functionally the same.
This sounds pretty annoying though: https://docs.gitlab.com/administration/license_usage/
does not portend good things for the future
When I was younger, the only way information, and especially video/audio was spread is via a select few outlets.
Today, anyone can upload anything to a variety of servers and spread the information within seconds.
an out of control, bipartisan oligarchy
The majority of HN has been on the winning side of this equation, benefiting greatly from the rise of the computer, internet, and now Ai. This is not most people, we forget about them, we tell them it's their own fault when it is not. The game is not fair, it's rigged for most humans.
Michael Sandel explains it better than I can yet
He did, however, recommend an author at the end of his comment, and that's whom I was referring to when I said "communist political philosopher"
GitLab is thought-out to support larger groups with more complex pipelines, and while it's got it's own set of quirks, it doesn't begin to compare, GitHub in contrast seems like a toy forge for toy projects.
And of course many people self-host which changes a lot of the equation (which you can also do with GitHub, but not for free - and FWIW our self-hosted premium gitlab has about an hour a day downtime, which we've been told by the team responsible is an unavoidable side-effect of backing up gitlab).
But at the same time, if you're not a global company, doing it at 3am is probably fine.
Something like, "if you look at us, we must be able to look at you"
I recommend Drone.io or WoodpeckerCI for hosting your own CI. It's a very good design; very simple, easy to run, easy to use, integrates with most systems you'd want to, abstracts away components rather than tightly integrating them, and you don't need to be a programmer to use it. So basically the opposite of Dagger.
- Container based workflows are the same in CI and locally (you can run containers too), they become one-liners
- Remote caching out of the box without extra steps
- Multiple language SDKs, unlocks the DAG in BuildKit and containers, real reuse
- Obfuscates secrets from your logs and agents. I've built an agent environment on Dagger, which also includes forking and time travel)
tl;dr - Dagger gives you SDK access to BuildKit and container based DAGs for building or anything else.
v1-beta just released yesterday: https://dagger.io/blog/dagger-10-beta/
---
edit: they are replacing BuildKit (for good reasons) and that is already out https://dagger.io/changelog/theseus/
Shared pipelines across multiple projects
rules: have far more flexibility than githubs if:
GitLab is very easy to fan out CI/CD runners on your own k8s infra.
GitLab's model is different - at least it was when I moved over to it. They charged for public repositories and gave you a free private ones as a sampler for trying out the platform. That approach is far less prone to getting overrun by millions of slopositories.
GitLab never tried to be the social media of software development. Theirs is a much simpler, classical model - one of the reasons I switched to them: you pay them money, they provide you services for that money.
That's fine. GitLab offers self-hosted solutions where companies run the service in their own infrastructure and limit who has access to it. The same cannot be said by GitHub, though.
That isn't true. Self hosted Github exists, and has for years now. From what I hear (from a friend who had to administer his company's instance) it's not a good product by any means, but it does exist.
> Do you have some time?
Okay, I laughed.
As for gitlab...yuck. But whatever. Most of the dev tool space is really just "sh* we have to put up with now", none of it is any good, all of it is dated from the early aughts, and taken as a whole is even worse because none of it works together.
While software development itself got better in the last ten years these tools stayed the same or got worse (enshittification). And this is part of why folks are self hosting.
The other part is that AI is destroying the Internet and its time to pack your bags anyway. The smart people already have.
Same reason we ended up with git. Their predecessors were significantly worse, and then they had enough momentum to keep going.
You broadcasted your negative feedback but it seems you had no positive remarks to give. If you feel everything is so bad, would you mind sharing what tolerable alternatives are there to GitHub and GitLab?
Not the op, and while your criticism of their negativity may be somewhat justified, the ask is kind of silly. There are a bunch of well known alternatives:
Self-hosted free software:
Gerrit <https://www.gerritcodereview.com> Phorge <https://we.phorge.it>
SaaSsy:
Codeberg <https://codeberg.org> SourceHut <https://sr.ht/>
There are a lot more, of course, these are just the ones I have experience with.
Gitlab CE is open-source. There exist versions of Gitlab with features that require payment. This does not mean that Gitlab (the product) is not open-source; it means that Gitlab (the company) has a core product which is open-source, and then sustains its development through the sale of licenses to product tiers beyond that.
I am even considering hosting my own GIT server myself. Some of our deployments got affected multiple times in the last 6 months alone we were really caught off-guard. Thankfully our clients were understanding of the GitHub outages. But, this should not be the baseline. Reliability should not be the cost of doing business.
[1] https://github.com/creativefoundrysg/desktop#an-open-letter-...
Everyone spent years talking against GPL, business friendly licenses like MIT and Apache were the way of the future, not viral and co.
Now we are here, most projects have their key contributors working at corporations like Microsoft, or gladly getting their acquisition money to pay the VCs, embrace your business friendly licenses.
Every other free service would die nearly instantly, so maybe only want useful things to move to other services.
>I am even considering hosting my own GIT server myself.
It's mostly a good idea.... but, with the current security apocalypse we seem to be under making sure your own shit doesn't get pwned is a full time job. The level of security hostility on the internet recently has reached numbers I've never seen before. RCE's dropping about every day, more targeted scans than I've ever seen in my life, swarms of AI bots breaking into services.
Say annual contracts start at 100k minimum and everyone gets a dedicated support engineer.
You get your own rack. None of this degraded shared capability nonsense.
Does that seem like a solid business ?
What I'm thinking of is a company that exclusively caters to the enterprise.
You get a support engineer and they help on everything, migration, CI/CD, hosting, etc.
Nothing goes down without a solid 3 page write up.
https://git-scm.com/tools/guis