:/ This feels like a 100% reaction to the GitHub acquisition by VCs not understanding the market. I'll bet the inbound to them was nuts the weeks following the new. Good on Sid for fleecing the VCs though how GitLab ever supports that valuation is beyond me.
Hope they put a lot of it (money) in their server infrastructure and better management of incident handling on gitlab.com. Thinks can break or get slow (sure) but their competitor (github) is in comparison rock solid. I cannot even count the 503 or git downtimes on gitlab.com I hope they look on a lot of worse case scenarios like e.g. an upgrade breaks things, DB issues etc. and look how big big cloud installations are doing this stuff (staged updates, roll backs etc.)
Yikes that's a lot of money. I wonder if they'll still continue to pay developers less than their peers because they live somewhere more affordable.
The reason why I think GitLab has been massively overvalued and why GitLab will ultimately fail is because it is storming head on into becoming a stale company.
Normally a startup is innovating in one vertical, disrupting the market with new ideas or technology which enables users and the company itself to profit of those innovations. This continues normally until the startup has become number one in that vertical. Then it must defend its spot against other newcomers who want to disrupt. Part of the defence is diversification, use the capital to disrupt in other places as well. This has been the natural progression of every successful business I know. At some point that company is so big though, competing in so many verticals that it becomes stale. It stops innovating and is constantly on the defence. Only innovation comes through acquisition which is often just a way to defend your spot by buying early.
GitLab is sort of not even trying to become number one in one vertical. Like the CEO said in his interview, GitLab already competes in 9 different verticals (JIRA, Jenkins, GitHub, NewRelic, Artifactory, etc.) and they are not near the top anywhere yet. They are going to become stale before even reaching a single peak in any industry. So far they have not innovated anything yet. Their only innovation is "free private repos" and "cramming 9 different domains into one product", which is nothing more than a pricing strategy and a lack of focus and not an innovation. It's painful to watch. Their business model looks like their products: an absolute mess.
I started using GitLab a week ago. Only because they offer free private repos. GitLab feels unpolished and I encountered so many small UI bugs. If they said they are three people and just founded their startup, ok, sure. But Series D, at a $1B valuation? I guess their priorities lie somewhere else.
Congrats to the GitLab team! They and a few other companies lately have shown fantastic customer and revenue numbers around an open source product. (I mean, a $1B+ valuation is cool, but the underlying customer metrics are way more important because that’s what it’s all based on.) This is an important step toward increasing the % of all software that is open source.
Calling Joseph Jacks to give some data here... (I know some other names of companies with tremendous numbers but don’t recall which are public info, so I don’t want to risk it.)
This article by Frederic over at Techcrunch has an interview with Sid, our CEO at GitLab. It should answer a lot of people's questions in the comments below. https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/19/gitlab-raises-100m/
Be careful when considering the market share of these vendors based on anecdotal SaaS experience. A large portion of their revenue comes from their enterprise editions which are hosted in-house. We're seeing significant growth by GitLab in this area with our enterprise clients.
To who ever is doubting gitlab right now:
Checkout their CI/CD flow in combination with their Docker/Kube integration. You'll see why they are poised to steal the rug from under github.
I use GitLab for all my side projects. I personally love the integrated CI/CD. But there's one thing that I absolutely hate and is their hierarchy model for repos. In GitHub, repos are first class citizens. For some reason, I feel that in GitLab you get a diluted repo experience.
I think I would abandon GitLab altogether if Microsoft ever makes private repos free.
Gitlab. The Evernote of source control.
Zoinks!
I have wanted to and tried to like GitLab. I can't. Everything about it is less than half baked, most of all their CI stuff. It's hard to see them having line of sight to a $1B valuation when they can't do the basics and are trying to recreate the terrible monolithic systems of years gone by. That's not a world I want to live in ever again...
Maybe they can spend some of that cash improving the atrocious service levels on gitlab.com
This may be a reaction to Microsoft's GitHub acquisition. They need a stronger competition.
And so, the clock starts.
Right now sales people at GitHub are trying to convert our $200 grandfathered plan into a $2000 one per month at no avail because we can just move over to Gitlab and get same or better service. I’m thankful for Gitlab’s existence and am just watching this unfold popcorn at hand. I bet I can probably cut that $200 bill into a $0 if I asked Gitlab now after their big fundraise.
As Jack Welch says, strive to be #1 or #2 in your industry, seems gitlab is well positioned to make a run at this, and given the price tag Github set for this type of product in the devtool space, 1.1 seems very respectable. Nice work Gitlab CEO, good luck! :)
To people who have used GitLab: is there any way in which GitLab is not just an incremental improvement over GitHub? Or is there something I'm missing? (Genuine question; not trolling).
I wonder if that means they'll finally create a dark theme which has been on the request list for years and has been pushed from releases time and time again.
While I'm a huge GitLab fan since June 4th, but one thing that concerns me greatly, which hopefully will be resolved with this extra money, is the huge number of growing issues.
What's even more scary herein is, that some issues/feature request get put on the back-burner because "there's bigger problems to solve" or "more valueable features to build"
$1.1 Billion? That too much, even Github hasn't reached profitability yet inspite of being the most popular Code hosting site. Gitlab can never reach the level of popularity that Github has. Then how are they valuing it at the price point? Some of Khoslas investment lately are so off, for instance the 'Hyperloop' transport Inc.
GitLab is pretty awesome. I switched for many of my projects over the last few months and I'm most enjoying the time tracking functionality. Very simple, yet very powerful. It's nice to be able to estimate or track time using commit messages or a command line helper tool like gtt.
> “Some of our tools, like continuous integration, are already best in class,” GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij told VentureBeat.
Either the GitLab CEO has never heard about Jenkins and TeamCity or he is making false statements to get more investor money.
I wonder how well they explain to their employees how this can wipe out their upside. Venture Deals by Brad Feld is a great read to help understand why this is potentially a dangerous situation to be in: https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-Capitali...
Okay, are we starting migrating to another hosted Git service right now or do we wait for them to start behaving shady and eventually selling out? Asking for a friend.
Great news! For Kitspace [1] I am currently working on re-purposing GitLab for electronics projects. It's good to see that "upstream" is getting more financial support.
I believe GitLab being open source is going to save me a ton of time and it could do this in other areas as well. I always thought GitHub could have been a much more remarkable product if it had been open source given its community. Let's make it happen with GitLab.
[1]: https://kitspace.org
I run GitLab on my server and it is just too slow, sometimes I get a 503. I hope they take a look at this asap.
Came to the comments to complain about GitLab not having language stats on a repo landing page, as I thought that was the #1 missing feature. Very pleased to see it was added three months ago!
Surprised it took this long, this is one of the first things I look at when considering contributing to a repo: Am I proficient in it's primary lang(s)?
Looks like a rampant acquisition by Google imho
On a related note, is Gitlab profitable?
$1.1B in valuation is insane, and seems to exist to justify $100M funding rounds.
GitLab is far superior to GitHub
Is there room for one more?
Haha here we go, GV.
Now those who complained about GH and moved to GL again have something to complain about...
And I commented here two months ago how these guys will end up being a part of Google's Adware Network.
Maybe they can improve the awful performance. They keep denying it's due to their site being in Ruby, but I don't buy it. Rewrite it in Go already.
wow.
I've been a long-time Github user and believer and vaguely followed Gitlab since their beginnings. Much as I admired their company and business, I had a lot of problems with their UI, UX and scattered focus.
Then very recently I've had to use Gitlab for a variety of new projects. And just... wow, it has come a long way.
There is an incredible amount of tooling and features, native to Gitlab. It's actually scary, and in some places even gets messy (feature overload). But a lot of it is useful stuff Github really should be offering. Things like more metadata on projects, subprojects. A very in-depth permission system (invite users with read-only access, issue-only access; membership expiration, ...). Branch protection integrated into various features.
Native CI! That's the big one. Travis is terrible. I used Gitlab CI to deploy one of my most recent project and ... it's been great. Was very simple to configure, felt a lot less magic and constrained than Travis, and it's very well integrated into Gitlab.
All this to say that I'm just about converted. Unfortunately, I have my 10+ year old profile on Github which includes membership to various projects and orgs, but I'm now pretty definitely using both platforms.
Edit: Here's my Github profile so people know I mean business when I'm praising Gitlab. https://github.com/jleclanche