GitHub Issues vs GitLab issues

GitHub's UI is clean and intuitive. Each view is designed to not fill the screen with useless information.

For example, the repository view displays only the most crucial data about that repo - on the top it displays the number of commits, branches, releases and contributors. When clicked, each of them will take the user to a page that displays more detailed information.

GitHub is the largest code host on the planet with over 21.4 million hosted repositories and many users. It's unarguably the largest VCS used by developers worldwide and as such, it has a vibrant community that follows it resulting in many guides and tutorials for new users. Even experienced developers can always find an answer to any question they may have.

GitHub has added another layer of security to their user accounts. This layer comes in the form of Two-Factor authentication. After it's enabled, GitHub delivers an authentication code by SMS, or by a free application for smartphones. After two-factor authentication is enabled, the authentication code is sent to the account owner's phone any time someone attempts to sign into their GitHub account. This means that only someone who has both the password and authentication code can sign into the account.

GitHub can be integrated with Travis CI for code testing and it is free for free open-source projects.

Any user can fork a project and submit a pull request. If accepted by the owner, the fork will be merged with the master branch.

GitHub has easy and useful features to control teams, large and small alike. Team members can be given different powers on different projects, ranging from the ability to create them, to only being able to have read-only access.

GitHub has native apps for mobile (iOS and Android), Windows and Mac, which make code deployment easier and faster.

Issues can be linked to a specific release using GitHub Projects.

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.

Gitlab is a free open source project licensed under MIT. Source code for Enterprise Edition can be found here and Community Edition here.

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.

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.

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.