When comparing JFrog Artifactory vs Gitlab Container Registry, the Slant community recommends Gitlab Container Registry for most people. In the question“What are the best docker image private registries?” Gitlab Container Registry is ranked 1st while JFrog Artifactory is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Gitlab Container Registry is:
Good integration into the repository you build your docker images out of. Just activate it for your repo and you're done. Most of the time new projects/repo have it on by default.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Can run as a Docker container
A very simple setup for trial and production deployment using Docker.
Pro Run it locally or get it as a service
You can install Artifactory locally in your data center or get it as a service from JFrog on one of several cloud providers (currently AWS, GCP and Azure).
Pro Integration with JFrog Xray
JFrog Xray enables scanning of Docker images for known vulnerabilities, license compliance issues, providing a full component graph and analysis tool.
Pro Universal binary repository manager for Docker and any other package type
One centralized repository for any package type.
Pro Support high availability set up
Pro Integration into GitLab
Good integration into the repository you build your docker images out of. Just activate it for your repo and you're done. Most of the time new projects/repo have it on by default.
Pro Free
Cons
Con Free account is closed after 2 weeks of inactivity
Con Very frustrating
Con Docker registry support is not available on their OSS version
Con Buggy Installation and Migrations with version 7
Con Tight integration into GitLab
If you're not building your docker images via GitLab CI, it's kinda hard to push images to the registry.
Con Docker garbage collection
Gitlab has very poor docker garbage collection management by default. One must read a good portion of the documentation to know what to do, so that garbage collection kicks in.