When comparing GitLab issues vs Phabricator, the Slant community recommends GitLab issues for most people. In the question“What are the best free bug-tracking tools for programming? ” GitLab issues is ranked 1st while Phabricator is ranked 5th. 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
Question Ranking
Pros
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 Issues can have weight
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.
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 Free and open source
Phabricator is completely free and open source. It's source code is hosted on GitHub.
Pro Actively updated
Phabricator is quickly improving, with bug fixes and new features added often. There is an update to the changelog every couple of weeks.
Pro Bug tracker is included
Includes a bug tracker out of the box. Allows for managing bugs, creating issues, commenting on them and closing them.
Pro Built-in Q&A platform - Ponder
Instead of having to have separate Q&A tool, there's Ponder which takes out the hassle.
Pro Supports the three major version control systems
Support for Git, SVN and Mercurial is available.
Pro Super flexible bussiness rules (Herald)
Pro Able to review graphical asset changes as well as code.
Pro Built-in Wiki and pages support
Pro Code ownership
Users can subscribe to files or even repositories and notifications will be sent when code you are subscribed to is changed.
Pro Command Line Access (via arc)
Pro Able to track design mockups
You can track not only code bud also design mockups.
Pro Built-in voting
You can create voting in an instant and need not to rely on external tools.
Pro Built-in blogging platform
There's a great platform which you can use to post stuff, or use as an internal blog, dev blog, release anouncement place and many others.
Pro Fine grained access control
With using Spaces and Project and custom policies you can have any combination of access to any object inside of your own Phabricator instance.
Pro Built-in Chatrooms
Pro Able to manage legal agreements for open source projects
Pro Designed by software engineers for software engineers
The engineering workflow is far superior to Github style branching and merging. Phabricator separates local representations of the repository from remote, which enables a variety of workflow optimisations, like stacked diffs on a single branch.
Pro Fully customizeable workboard
You can configure your workspace to deal with tasks, bugs, todo's, etc.
Cons
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.
Con Difficult to configure
Compared to a solution like Bitbucket Server (granted Phabricator offers more options), it is difficult to configure. Settings are scattered everywhere and you must drill down through several screens to find some of them. Documentation is very complete but also not always in parity with the application itself.