GitHub vs. GitLab and other DevOps tools

GitHub Enterprise Cloud offers a cloud-hosted enterprise product plan (SaaS) for large businesses and teams who need a complete DevSecOps solution. It provides tools for greater management of an organization's resources using sophisticated security and administrative features, for example through authentication with SAML single sign-on. GitHub Enterprise Cloud includes support for 50,000 minutes of GitHub Actions runtime for CI/CD workflows and 50GB of storage for shared components and containers. You can learn more about GitHub Enterprise Cloud in our documentation or product page.

GitHub offers thorough documentation around all of its products with detailed how-to guides that walk teams, developers, and administrators through maximizing their investment with GitHub Enterprise. You can find GitHub’s documentation at docs.github.com, which offers a centralized place to find the latest information about GitHub’s products, how to use them, and how to get help. This documentation is kept up-to-date by our documentation teams partnering closely with engineering, our product teams, and our outside community via community contributions.

If you’re making the move to GitHub, we know you’ll have data you want to bring with you so your team can hit the ground running quickly. We know that fear of migration can be a big barrier to switching to GitHub, which is why we’re working hard to make moving quick, low cost and painless. 

GitHub Enterprise Importer is our tried and tested migration tool, used by thousands of GitHub customers to migrate more than 690,000 repositories to GitHub Enterprise Cloud. You can migrate on your own terms with free, self-service migrations from GitHub Enterprise Server, Bitbucket Server, Bitbucket Data Center and Azure DevOps.  

If you’re moving from another tool or you’re looking to adopt GitHub Enterprise Server, there are options for you. For more details, and to learn about our tools for planning your migration and moving large numbers of repositories, check out: https://resources.github.com/migrations/

GitHub offers a simple way to turn personal accounts into organization accounts and migrate teams from personal accounts into organization accounts, too. You can find a full guide on how to do this in our documentation.

GitHub offers a complete cloud-hosted developer platform, which includes project planning, source code management, CI/CD, automation, application security and more. All of these features and capabilities are centralized within the core platform making it simple to plan projects, assign tasks, track work, and deploy code from one interface. GitHub’s project planning solution also integrates with task management and forum boards to track decision making trees, conversations, and project statuses. Learn more about project planning with GitHub Issues and how it ties into the everyday developer platform to increase the speed at which you can build, deploy, and scale solutions.

GitHub offers a number of pre-built and community-developed automation workflow templates that enable organizations to build powerful CI/CD pipelines, enforce environmental policies, and more. These workflow templates are designed to meet the needs of leading teams and companies and feature a sizable integration ecosystem. You can find more than 12,000 pre-built automation workflows in the GitHub Marketplace, which contains community-driven and tested automations for security, CI/CD, development workflows, platform integrations, and more. You can also learn more about how automation and CI/CD work on GitHub in our documentation.

GitHub offers integrations with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and other leading cloud providers through the GitHub Marketplace that make it simple to manage, build, and deploy cloud-native applications. GitHub also provides a number of pre-built and customizable CI/CD and automated workflows to manage, provision, and orchestrate cloud computing resources with GitHub Actions.

Trying to choose between GitHub vs. GitLab for DevOps? The short answer: It depends on your current business needs and your growth plans. GitHub and GitLab are both mature, cloud-based SaaS platforms that offer native capabilities and integrations with third-party tools. While GitLab has their roots and the majority of their business in on-premises environments, they also have a relatively small cloud offering. GitHub is the home of open source and has been a cloud-native solution since their inception. GitHub also offers on-premises environments. Before making a decision on GitHub vs. GitLab, you’ll likely want to conduct your own research and test each solution.

Making a decision between GitHub vs. Bitbucket to scale your DevOps practice? The answer depends on what you’re looking to accomplish and your organizational goals. GitHub and Atlassian Bitbucket are both mature platforms with native capabilities and third-party integrations. GitHub offers both a cloud-hosted SaaS model and a self-managed deployment model. In contrast, Bitbucket only offers a self-hosted solution for 500 seats or more with recurring license and support fees and otherwise promotes their cloud-hosted SaaS solution after making an end-of-life announcement for their on-premise Server product).

Trying to decide whether to use GitHub Actions vs. Jenkins? If you’re looking for a cloud-hosted CI/CD solution, GitHub Actions bring extensive and platform-native capabilities to the GitHub platform. Plus, it’s included in GitHub Enterprise. You can also look at CloudBees, which is the commercial variant of Jenkins and fully integrates into the GitHub experience. But where GitHub offers a complete DevOps and DevSecOps platform, Jenkins and its CloudBees commercial solution focus only on automation and CI/CD capabilities.

Trying to understand the difference between Git vs. GitHub? It helps to understand what each solution is. Let’s start with Git: Originally developed in 2005 by Linux inventor Linus Torvalds, Git is a locally installed version control system used to track file changes in development workflows. Its primary purpose is to help developers coordinate work and track changes to source code over time. You can learn more about Git on Git-guides. In contrast, GitHub offers an end-to-end DevOps platform with cloud-hosted Git services—i.e., source code management (SCM) and versioning control. GitHub also includes project management, CI/CD, automation, enterprise-grade security scanning, and more to serve all software development needs.