When comparing Kanban Tool vs GitLab issues, the Slant community recommends GitLab issues for most people. In the question“What are the best feature tracking/planning tools for small development teams?” GitLab issues is ranked 2nd while Kanban Tool is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose GitLab issues is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Intuitive
You will probably figure out how it works in a couple of minutes.
Pro Time tracking reports
Great and seamless time tracking with best time tracking reports.
Pro Customizable and reassuring
Thanks to the visualization of work, it's much easier to see the progress of work. Boosts the confidence in what you endeavour upon and reassures each step of the process. The customization allows to fit a system right to the process you've planned, so that we don't have to match our work to an external way, but build our own.
Pro Good number of integrations
Kanban Tool integrates with: Zapier, WeWiredWeb, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box, Google calendar, iCal, Outlook, flexible and well-documented API for external systems integration, RSS feeds for boards, Chrome extension for adding tasks, JIRA® integration (Chrome extension - Kanbanira), adding tasks and comments from email, export/import Excel/CSV.
Pro Simple customization
Kanban Tool provides a collection of power-ups that allow you to customize it to meet your needs. Especially, "Developer tools" are worth mentioning. With this power-up you can add custom scripts and stylesheets to your board.
Pro Scalable
No matter how big a team you work in, kanban tool fits nicely. Thanks to the ability to customize the boards, it's easy to match a board to the size of the process. The kanban tool has been growing with our process for the past 3 years, we started with 3 people and 2 boards, now we have 24 employees and 16 main boards with several process steps each and the system works just as well.
Pro User friendly interface
Pro Work statistics
You can clearly see on a graph how much of planned work have you done already. It's very motivating.
Pro Pleasant design
Pro Swimlanes and customization
You can very easily adjust the board layout to suit your needs and even add swimlanes to have all projects on the same Kanban board.
Pro On-site version available
Pro iOS app coming soon
Just been told by the Support Team there will be an iOS app soon.
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 Comes with integrated CI/CD solution
GitLab CI makes it easy to set up CI and deployment for projects in GitLab. It supports parallel testing, multiple platforms, Docker containers and streaming build logs.
Pro Regular updates
GitLab is being constantly worked on and has a new release every month on the 22nd. Updating is also very easy through a single upgrade script.
Pro Issues can have weight
On GitLab EE (free for open-source projects only) you can set the weight of an issue during its creation (from 1 to 9) to get a better idea of how much time, value or complexity a given issue has.
Cons
Con Not immediately self-hostable
To self-host, your server needs to have 10 or more users, and prices on self-hosting are not disclosed.
Con Search could be better
Search is not reliable.
Con Non libre/open source (propietary)
Con Search functionality is not that refined
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.