GitLab vs Jira – What’s the Difference? (Pros and Cons). Are you a project manager with a large team? Managing mid sized or large sized teams can be challenging at times.
The main reason why teams struggle to function well is that they are not optimized to be efficient, and they make mistakes when they don’t have the right tools.
We have product management tools like Gitlab and Jira available for us. Now the only confusion you have is to choose between GitLab and Jira.
If you’re trying to learn more about each option to make the right choice for your business, this is the article for you.
Well, let’s start with GitLab vs Jira – What’s the Difference?
What is GitLab?
GitLab is a web based application that allows you to manage your projects and teams in a centralized manner. It an open source code repository and collaborative software development platform for large DevOps and DevSecOps projects. It provides a location to store code online and offers capabilities for issue tracking and CI/CD.
In a simple term, it is a repository and collaborative software development platform that provides free open and private repositories.
Also used to track workflow issues and bottlenecks in the pipelines along with team and project management.
Features of GitLab
The project of GitLab offers very useful features. Some of them are listed below:
- Packed with built in features to help developers manage, plan, build, configure and monitor projects and developments. It offers subgroups and audit events useful for management, while issue tracking, description templates and task lists enable faster planning.
- We also like how easy it is to overwrite and merge projects within the platform. Also, let’s not forget powerful GitLab branches, commit graphs, and a handy built in file finder for builds.
- The GitLab is ideal for larger teams who need access to features to improve their workflows.
- The platform also has a great UI/UX design that makes it easy to use. The tooltips are great in explaining what each button does. This feature helps new users understand how to work with GitLab better.
- Provides powerful planning tools to keep everyone synchronized. Comes with all of the essential DevOps tools in one DevOps platform that helps teams improve cycle time from weeks to minutes.
Pros of GitLab
- The benefits of GitLab is that it helps developers build and manage their applications. This is evident in its features and services.
- it is an end to end solution for rapid application development. This means that it not only enables users to build applications, but also ensures that they can manage the entire application lifecycle, which covers the process of building, testing and deploying applications.
- Another pros of GitLab’s security features also include the ability to delegate the right responsibilities and levels of access and permissions to the right team members.
- Dedicated account managers and agents are always available to assist you, especially in emergency situations.
Cons of GitLab
- Sometimes it gets very slow and causes problems connecting or updating servers. Searching is difficult on some pages.
- Some features available on GitHub are missing. This isn’t a clear disadvantage because there are other similar sites out there that offer similar services and have more features than GitHub.
- A little confusing at first. It is complex to use and has a steep learning curve. The user interface could be modified to make things easier for new users and existing users alike!
next in this blog article GitLab vs Jira – What’s the Difference? is to introduce Jira.
What is Jira?
Jira is an online project management tool that helps teams and companies develop products or deliver services without bottlenecks in their workflow.
This tool offers agile project management, as well as bug and issue tracking to ensure each team member is on the same page to produce great results without any issues in the workflow.
Features of Jira
- The project management tool Jira offers a full set of useful features to help you navigate the platform and use all of its features and tools. Also the platform adds context to feature development states to keep you up to date and help you understand how to use them for your projects.
- You might also like the way the platform provides end to end devops visibility, which can be useful for those who prefer learning through visual and workflow automation capabilities to accelerate task execution.
- This platform is best suited for medium sized teams that need to test and track specific processes.
- Allows teams to create customizable workflows that map to any style of work.
- Offers 3000+ apps and integrations that helps to extend the power of Jira Software.
- Robust reporting features, ranging from burndown charts to velocity measurements.
Pros of Jira
- Cloud based administration of Jira’s makes it accessible for remote workers, allowing them to examine and address software issues from any place on the planet.
- Permits users to collaborate with their team members by offering easy to navigate, centralized records that give you a complete look at your organization’s progress.
- You can see all your projects in one place, track their statuses and tell when they’re due within the next week or month.
- It gives you broad adaptability through its API strategy, which permits you to extend it to your own purposes.
Cons of Jira
- Jira Software can be hard to set up for first time customers.
- It is appropriate for monitoring bugs, issues and the course of development of agile tasks. But as a venture control software, it lacks capabilities to manipulate charges or determine dangers.
- As a result of these limitations, Jira Software isn’t right for managing day to day operations.
GitLab vs Jira - Key Differences
Pricing of GitLab vs Jira
GitLab Pricing
With GitLab it offers a 30 day free trial so you can test its features. You can set up your projects and use all the features of the tool to experience how GitLab CI/CD works in practice.
For example, the Premium plan is ideal for teams of all sizes, while the Ultimate plan is suitable for businesses and government agencies. In addition to the above, you can also purchase additional CI / CD minutes (€ 10 for 1000 minutes) and additional storage (€ 60 for 10 GB of storage and 20 GB of transfer per month).
Jira Pricing
On the other hand Jira offers a 7 day free trial of its Standard or Premium plan. Users can fully test the tool before spending money and choose any of the premium options after the trial expires if they wish.
Pricing plans of Jira’s are divided into two categories: Jira Cloud and Jira Data Center Hosting.
At Jira Data Center, you get a single Data Center plan starting at $42,000 per year for 500 users. The company also offers a 30 day free trial for this plan.
As you can see, GitLab is the cheapest option. Clearly Jira is more expensive. But considering the top notch features and support it offers, it’s still worth giving Jira a try.
Licensing in Gitlab and Jira
There is no major difference between Gitlab and Jira when it comes to their licensing. Both GitLab and Jira are licensed for closed source, which is undoubtedly limiting in some ways, but can still be reliable and stable in other ways.
GitLab Licensing
Firstly GitLab CE is proprietary closed source software. Think of it this way: The hosted service GitLab.com is open source, offering radically improved collaboration for open source projects.
However, the software that GitLab uses is closed source.
Jira Licensing
But Jira is based on a closed source license, which means it’s limited in the features you can use it for. However, it is free for businesses and non-profits to use. So it’s not as if closed source code doesn’t have its share of benefits.
Reporting
GitLab Reporting
Reporting is lacking with GitLab. It lacks capabilities that provide real time information about the projects within it. All it offers are unit test reports and metrics reports, which are also not driven by team data and project flow.
This is in contrast to Jira, which offers unique real time reports combined with actionable insights.
You can use these reports to understand your team’s performance, the time it takes to complete projects, the effectiveness of team collaboration, and other useful information.
Jira Reporting
The advantage of Jira’s reporting features is that it provides you with various charts and graphs to display your reports. This way you can present your data visually, which can help convey your message more effectively.
Templates in Gitlab vs Jira
Both Gitlab and Jira provide flexible templates, which you can easily customize to your need.
GitLab Templates
When creating a new Gitlab project you can choose to create a project from scratch, use an out of the box GitLab template, or import a project from sources such as Fogbugz.
The advantage of using pre made templates is that you can start your project faster. Additionally, each GitLab template comes with a pre configured sample code that makes your job even easier all you have to do is show a video on the existing sample code.
Jira Templates
Also with Jira project management software that includes 33 ready made templates in a variety of categories, from software development to financing, service management and sales.
These templates allow you to start working on a new project without having to start over. Each Jira model is highly customizable, so you can always adapt it to your needs.
Plus, they’re tailor made for a particular purpose, so chances are you won’t need to make as many changes as if you were starting a new project. Because of this flexibility, Jira has become one of the most popular tools for teams across an array of industries and functions.
Integrations
Though Gitlab and Jira work in very different ways, they offer many amazing integrations for you to choose from.
GitLab Integrations
There is an easy integration with GitLab. Integrates easily with third party tools, so you can take advantage of them without having to worry about the details. It also integrates with Jira, giving you the ability to browse all your projects right from your GitLab repository.
Interestingly, all GitLab integrations happen directly through the code, making them feel like native apps in the tool. We also like the way the tool provides code quality and code security checks for each integration, so you never compromise the security of your projects.
Jira Integrations
On the other hand Jira also allows users to integrate third party options through plug in integrations. This allows you to easily integrate the most popular software tools with the tool to improve workflows.
With market access where you can integrate several amazing apps, you never have to worry about Jira being incompatible with other apps you use for work.
Whether it’s Zoom or Slack, Jira is incredibly versatile and integrates with everyone. If your company uses a third party tool that you don’t want to leave out of the equation, you can add their integration into Jira as well!
That is great! Thank you for reading this article until the end. GitLab vs Jira – What’s the Difference? It is time to summarize.
GitLab vs Jira – What’s the Difference? Conclusion
To conclude both project management tools are widely used. Both Gitlab and Jira have their own advantages and disadvantages as it completely depends upon the project specification and requirements. You can merge them based on your requirements and business goals.
If you are looking for a version control system then go with GitLab, Else, if you want to monitor workflows in your team and have reporting abilities then select Jira as a tool.
Why don’t you take a look at our Gitlab content here.
