Recs.
Updated
SpecsUpdate
Pros
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 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 Private projects for free
Gitlab offers an unlimited number of private projects with their free/community edition account.
Cons
Con Requires at least 1GB of RAM
The default installation is meant for already many users and recommends 2GB of RAM. 1GB is possible but results in some HTTP 500 errors. On a Raspberry Pi 2 it runs fine most of the time, though it eats 75% of the RAM.
Another option is to reduce unicorn['worker_processes']
in gitlab.rb.
Recommendations
Comments
Flagged Pros + Cons
Con No support for reply via email UPDATE This is included since GitLab 8.0
Reply by email is in GitLab now http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/incoming_email/README.html
Out of Date Pros + Cons
Con Search functionality is not that refined UPDATE searching is fixed
While you can search for users or projects, you cannot search for a filename. This makes GitLab's search one of the weak points in an otherwise great tool. => Since GitLab 8.4 it has a fuzzy filefinder https://about.gitlab.com/2016/01/22/gitlab-8-4-released/