Conclusion from reading: Gitlab is just another open-source company that raised money and is now desperate to monetize it's products.
Unfortunately for them. The market is already saturated with CI tools, including good ones.
- If you want good self-hosted CI, you use teamcity (jetbrains) or bamboo (atlassian). Side note: They cost money, you get what you pay for.
- If you want good SaaS CI, you use travis-ci (linux), circle-ci (linux) or appveyor (windows).
- If you want to suffer endlessly, you use Jenkins (previously hudson). It's shit, it has a Bad UI, it's an aggregation of poorly maintained plugins, it lack even the most simple features, the list goes on...
- If you want to go exotic, you can find dozens of other [partial] CI tools.
There is no room for gitlab. Teamcity already has a free edition offering 20 projects and 3 slaves. All the aforementioned tools are free for open-source projects.
Disclaimer: I have used all the tools mentioned above.
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The reason the good tools are not popular is:
1) they cost money and people are bitches when it comes to spending even $10
2) most people start with the old well-known shitty tools and then they're locked in... and the efforts required to move away just increase over time (sadly, nobody got fired for choosing Jenkins in the first place :( )
I've used just about all of the tools listed above as well and today happily I use gitlab for nearly all of them as opposed to miserably using some of them in piecework together.
> - If you want good self-hosted CI, you use teamcity (jetbrains) or bamboo (atlassian). Side note: They cost money, you get what you pay for.
Those are proprietary.
> - If you want good SaaS CI, you use travis-ci (linux), circle-ci (linux) or appveyor (windows).
I believe all of those are proprietary.
> There is no room for gitlab. Teamcity already has a free edition offering 20 projects and 3 slaves. All the aforementioned tools are free for open-source projects.
As far as I can tell, every project you mentioned except Jenkins is proprietary. And as much as I like Jenkins, you're right that it can be a proper pain to deal with. So you're just showing that there is a need for a good, free software, CI system. And GitLab is working on providing one.
It's really hard to charge money, especially against a truckload of both free AND paid tools which do the job.
They decided to NOT charge money on the number of projects or the number of runners. They've made a product with no incentive whatsoever to pay for it.
We could say it's great, we get get another free tool! but how are they going to make this work on the long term?
They have no business model and the investor funds will eventually run out at some point. Then, we'll be left with another free open source abandoned projects, just like jenkins?
Their business model is the enterprise edition which comes with better support and newer "enterprisey" features first. It seems to be doing really well given their comments here. Gitlab.com is a loss leader to get their potential users excited about gitlab so they convince the potential buyers to pay for it.
Perhaps I'm in the minority but I have actually setup my home system to use SSO (backed via LDAP).
It annoys me no end that all these services seem to think that charging to maintain my userbase is a way to get me to think they care.
What it means is it invariably the SSO support is barely tested and poorly documented. For a number of products, I've tried out the "enterprise" version and realised that their features (e.g. SSO, audit, etc.) are just not useful.
Largely because there are not enough people looking at the thing or attempting to use it.
You seem to be focusing only on their public instance gitlab.com which is comparable to github.com. They essentially have the same model as GitHub(free for the community, payed for enterprise/companies). From where I am standing they seem to be giving GitHub some healthy competition in both areas.
I've been using Gitlab CI for more than two months now, and it's incredibly simple to set up and really powerful specially with the integration with docker, also, self-hosted gitlab is free.
I also have Teamcity where I work and the comparison is not even fair, I set up gitlab in one day to serve as a continuous integration/deployment server
Also as the frontend lead, our focus will always be the user experience first and this is getting better every single day. Obviously you can use tons of products with a "bad UI", but you'll find that using GitLab will increase your life expectancy by lowering your stress level.
Unfortunately for them. The market is already saturated with CI tools, including good ones.
- If you want good self-hosted CI, you use teamcity (jetbrains) or bamboo (atlassian). Side note: They cost money, you get what you pay for.
- If you want good SaaS CI, you use travis-ci (linux), circle-ci (linux) or appveyor (windows).
- If you want to suffer endlessly, you use Jenkins (previously hudson). It's shit, it has a Bad UI, it's an aggregation of poorly maintained plugins, it lack even the most simple features, the list goes on...
- If you want to go exotic, you can find dozens of other [partial] CI tools.
There is no room for gitlab. Teamcity already has a free edition offering 20 projects and 3 slaves. All the aforementioned tools are free for open-source projects.
Disclaimer: I have used all the tools mentioned above.
-----
The reason the good tools are not popular is:
1) they cost money and people are bitches when it comes to spending even $10
2) most people start with the old well-known shitty tools and then they're locked in... and the efforts required to move away just increase over time (sadly, nobody got fired for choosing Jenkins in the first place :( )