Recs.
Updated
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro GitLab offers self-hosting for free
First, there's Community Edition - a free and open source self-hosted version with packages for Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS machines. It's licensed under MIT with code available here.
Then there's Enterprise Edition - a self-hosted solution that adds proprietary features on top of Community Edition that improve integrations with other tools, server management options, workflow management and authentication and authorization integration and starts at $19.90/user/year.
Self-hosted solution are great for keeping data private.
For more information about GitLab's self-hosted features: Link
Finally, there's a hosted solution that offers both public and private repositories for free.
Pro Open source
The GitLab software itself is available under an open source license. It's even mirrored on GitHub.
Pro Allows importing existing repositories
You can easily import your repositories from Bitbucket, GitHub, Gitorious or anywhere else, all in batch.
Pro Integrates fully with LDAP
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is an application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network.
GitLab EE adds additional functionality over CE such as support for multiple LDAP servers and group sync.
Pro Good web UI
GitLab's UI is clean and intuitive. Each view is designed to not fill the screen with useless information.
It displays the activity in a feed-type way in the most prominent part of the view. On top of that, there's a toolbar with buttons which can filter this feed by pushes, merge events or comments.
On the left, there's a menu that displays all the links that take you to the different views. For example, a file directory which displays all the files in that repo, a commit view which displays all the commits in cronological order, a network and a graph view that display important information graphically etc...
All these details make GitLab's UI extremely intuitive and easy to use, no view is overflown with information and every view displays only the most useful and crucial information needed at that time.
Pro Free service
Users can find an unlimited number of private repositories in GitLab. This service is completely free. Nevertheless, there is a notification that users will have to pay for storing files that exceed 10 Gb in their size.
Pro At feature parity with GitHub
GitLab is very close to GitHub in use and feel, written in Ruby on Rails, open source and hosted on Github as well as on GitLab.com.
Pro Integration with third party applications
GitLab integrates with multiple third-party services to allow external issue trackers and external authentication.
GitLab can integrate with many third-party apps to allow external issue tracking and authentication. It can also be integrated with several services, such as:
- Slack
- Campfire
- Flowdock
- Hipchat
- Gemnasium
- Pivotal Tracker
Cons
Con Hosting requires minimum of 2 GB RAM
Even for personal usage with one repo, it requires almost 2GB of RAM.
Recommendations
Comments
Flagged Pros + Cons
Pro Allows timetracking with Cycle-Analytics
Very useful project management feature that allows you to know how long it takes to go from the idea to production.
Pro Free and open source
Pro Issue tracking support
Has issue tracking out of the box. Creating tickets, commenting on issues, closing issues etc... It's all there out of the box.
Out of Date Pros + Cons
Con Search functionality is not that refined
While users and projects can be searched, files cannot. This makes GitLab's search one of the weak points in an otherwise great tool.