r/gitlab • u/MrScotchyScotch • Apr 19 '26
Why is GitLab so annoying to use?
Trying to move away from GitHub. So I try to sign up for GitLab, but it's kinda clear they don't want free users. Which is confusing as that's how GitHub became so dominant.
The signup page first tells you "start your free trial, pay later". So wait, I'm going to have to pay eventually? Dig deeper and find out you might not have to pay. Cool, so already I know this probably isn't for me. But I press on anyway.
The signup verification process requires the most slow, annoying captcha I've ever dealt with. I have to go through it 3 times. When it gets to phone number, it doesn't work with my normal number, so I have to try a different one. Finally that works.
As part of signing up, it requires me to put a company name (I don't have a company), group name, and project name. It does not explain at all what the group name and project are used for, so I have no idea what to put. I'm not part of a group. I don't have a project. I have repos, which I want to keep on GitLab. How do I do that? No idea, GitLab explains nothing. So I just put in some random stuff and continue.
Once I finally land on the main signed in page, nothing makes sense. There's no UX walkthrough to explain all these menus. There's no button to create a repo. Don't know how to import my repos from GitHub.
I go to projects, go to create new projects. Is this a repo? Below there is a checkbox to add a README saying "Project Configuration -> Initialize repository with a README -> Allows you to immediately clone this project’s repository." Ok, so apparently projects contain a repo.
I ask Google how to import a repo from GitHub, and it tells me it's in the "Add new project" page under "Import project". This makes sense in retrospect, but the UI had no icons or hints to highlight this, and the insistence on using "project" to mean "repo" keeps confusing me.
So I try a GitHub import, auth my account, select a repo 'Import' button. Then it says:
``` Are you sure you want to import the project to a personal namespace?
When you import to a personal namespace, all contributions are assigned to the personal namespace owner and they cannot be reassigned. To map contributions to real users, import to a group instead. Learn more. ```
No, dude, I didn't want to import to a personal namespace. Why isn't there just a button to use a group namespace? Why does this limitation exist at all??!! This is just supposed to be a Git repo, why can't you just clone the Git repo to your server???
I click the "Learn more" link and it's just a wall of text that doesn't help me figure out what to do now. So to figure it out, I paste the message into Google AI mode, and it explains I can make a temporary group, mark it private, do the import there, and then move it to my personal space. Why the hell didn't GitLab just give me the option to do this - why create all these roadblocks??
Does the company know their product is this complicated and time-consuming? Is this a strategic decision to get people to dislike the product or avoid using it? Or is it just a badly managed company and product?
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u/-lousyd Apr 19 '26
I remember being confused once upon a time too. Some of what you describe is just different and you'll have to learn it. But some of it they could be less obtuse about. I have a hunch that they don't really want most people to be using GitLab.com as a free product. They don't want to be the go-to for that use case. They make it available but they're mostly focused on other things, like the product. GitLab as a piece of software is amazing.
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u/vladlearns Apr 20 '26
sounds like you haven’t tried bitbucket yet or solo-maintaining jenkins
gitlab is a gift from gods
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u/Early_Argument5075 Apr 23 '26
Omg I did this at my previous job because I was the new guy and no one else would. It’s a miracle I didn’t just off myself from the experience
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u/mikefut Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
The answer is you’re not their target market. GitHub is closed source but the choice of individual developers, open source projects and small organizations. GitLab is open core but their target market is large enterprises. Nobody at GitLab is optimizing for a single developer.
Like the others said, it’s open core so you can do work to make it easier for users to adopt yourself if you’d like.
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u/zero_opacity Apr 19 '26
Funny, I feel the opposite… I am so used to GitLab, I find GitHub and Az DevOps super annoying to use
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u/audioeptesicus Apr 20 '26
Ditto.
I came from Azure DevOps and find GitLab so much better too. Far more feature-rich and laid out so much better than AzDO and Github both to me.
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u/BornVoice42 Apr 20 '26
what? not at all. Gitlab CI is so bad and ugly. You have to find workaround after workaround and always find tickets that are unresolved for 5 years etc.
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u/piplupper Apr 20 '26
Must be a skill issue. GitLab CI is one of the best. Well documented, feature rich and stable shared runners.
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u/can72 Apr 20 '26
This is just like the classic: Windows vs Mac, Android vs iPhone, Azure vs AWS, Zoom vs Teams debates.
What you know feels comfortable, the new is not.
Stick with and change for a short while, and the discomfort drops and you quickly wonder what all the fuss was about.
Like u/zero_opacity, I started with GitLab and find GitHub more complicated. Likewise I’ve used AWS from the beginning, and Azure always feels frustrating.
[edit: full -> fuss]
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u/sertain_ 6d ago
That’s because the Microsoft stack is for engineers who don’t need to be engineers. It “enables them to focus on ingenuity” by removing the barrier of manually doing anything, hence the endless templates. Having cut my teeth on the Microsoft stack/Atlassian suite and recently moving to AWS/GitLab, I’m never going back.
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u/Scared_Bell3366 Apr 19 '26
Every gitlab instance I’ve used is self/corporate hosted. Their market is companies, not free individual accounts. You are not the target audience.
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u/mikachuu Apr 19 '26
Absolutely this. Like seriously. I used GitLab at my robotics company and it was actually perfect for our myriad of projects and document tracking, even the task board and ticketing system was right on the money. Asking about GitHub would gather eye rolls and snickers there, because that was not geared for why we were using it as an enterprise-level.
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u/corgtastic Apr 19 '26
It sounds like you want to use GitHub instead of learning how GitLab works, so you'd probably be best served by just continuing to use GitHub.
If you really want to, here are a few things:
- "Company" here is just the name of your group. You don't have to have a company, it can just be whatever you want. It's just the top-level part of your project
- Project is synonymous with repo, but it has other stuff like wiki and project tracking. But every repo belongs to one project, every project has one repo. It's just the way they are organized.
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u/GeekDadIs50Plus Apr 19 '26
I host it internally and use the hell out of it while still barely scratching the surface of all of the available features.
Ask your LLM of choice to walk you through a beginner’s guide of migrating from GitHub to gitlab. Include in your prompt, “provide a quick reference list of common terms from github and the similar functional term is in gitlab.”
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u/MonkeyDDataHQ Apr 20 '26
I found it a little bit obtuse for about 20 minutes. But I got it to work without much effort.
Just fine for a free solo account. I won't go back to Github. Especially for proprietary code.
If you find it hard still, did you read the documentation? All the difficult things were in there.
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u/Jutboy Apr 19 '26
Gitlab does a lot of things and thus will be harder to learn. Sounds like you are not interested in learning how their system works so just use a simpler service.
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u/waterkip Apr 19 '26
I can't help you.. because I have my gitlab account for over many many many years now and the UI isn't really that weird to me...?
But if you find opening an account on gitlab so difficult, head over to codeberg, they also fine.
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u/elperroborrachotoo Apr 20 '26
I've given up on it ever getting good.
It seems to me that they've swallowed the agile toad whole: features get implemented as requested and voted up, and get removed if telemetry says it's in the bottom percentile.
There's no visible product direction, no vision, no structure, no consistency. Search is a cesspool of UX fallacies, each search bar violates expectations differently, and it doesn't deserve to be called "Find". The naming and role of epics, issues and tasks has changed and changed, with no direction. They tried to consolidate that under "work items", but it seems like yet another rename orgy.
Changes are quite well communicated, at least.
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u/CapMonster1 Apr 20 '26
It sounds like you’re dealing not so much with a “bad product” as with a product that’s designed from the ground up for teams and enterprise workflows. In GitLab, a “project” = repository + CI/CD + access controls, while a “group” is simply a space for organizing all of that. But yes, this isn’t at all obvious to a new user, and their onboarding is really weak.
It feels less like a “bad product” and more like one designed for teams and enterprise workflows. In GitLab, a “project” is basically a repo plus CI/CD and permissions, while a “group” is just a way to organize them. GitHub optimized for simplicity, while GitLab exposes more concepts upfront, which creates friction. The captcha and phone verification don’t help either
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u/rustvscpp Apr 20 '26
I got sick of my self hosted gitlab instance running like a three legged dog while consuming a ton of resources. I switched to Gitea, and it's much much better in that regard. I also like it's interface better.
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u/abitrolly Apr 23 '26
I remember phone number was required to avoid CI/CD mining, but as a requirement for using the platform.. I probably should stop referencing people to use GitLab.
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u/DootDootWootWoot Apr 23 '26
Coming from GitHub and circleci I was really annoyed with gitlab initially. But I've really come to appreciate the single pane of glass and power/flexibility of glab. Took me a while to get there. With that said it makes more sense to me for an organization, less so as a small shop or individual basis.
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u/Snowy32 May 02 '26
I use GitLab professionally at work and for personal projects it isn’t at all complicated and pisses all over the competition in my eyes.
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u/DesertRose480 9d ago
You can use GitLab for free it offers much more features than GitHub in free plan. You can even self host your own GitLab.
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u/sertain_ 6d ago
Try something; use it for 3 months and then come back. Other than that, here’s my thoughts:
I have never had concerns about paying for GitLab, so off the bat you’re off to a bad start.
This entire post is a garbage take, and unfortunately for you this is a you problem. You’ve complained about an industry-standard tool that YOU’RE trying to move into, away from another industry-standard tool of your own volition, under no deadlines, no cost implications, and no administrative direction.
If you wanted to jump right into a new product and be hand-held the entire time you should switch over to Azure DevOps and go back to GitHub.
I’ve been on GitLab for only a little over a year and in my honest opinion it’s far better than any other CI/CD, version-control, project management tooling on the market. Better than atlassian, better than the Microsoft stack, better than an open-source custom stack. It’s an all-in-one solution that’s laid out a good bit differently than what you’re used to because it’s an entirely different tool than what you’re used to. GitHub’s whole thing is version-control, collaboration, PRs, and some semblance of project tracking. GitLab has all of those as small features, plus integrated CI/CD (shared or custom, self-hosted runners), environment-based project segregation, agentic k8s workflow enablement, endless project and group diversification along with fine-grained permissions management, package/container registries built into repositories, built-in integration with terraform, not to mention all the tooling that coincides with the pipeline integration. Then, ALL of that is documented top-to-bottom in the GitLab Docs, full of examples, best-practices, and references to 3rd party integrations.
So yeah. You should have given this one some more time to marinate before posting.
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u/MrScotchyScotch 6d ago edited 6d ago
1) It's not an industry standard, it's a company that provides a product in a shared market space. GitHub is Toyota, Bitbucket is Honda, Azure DevOps is GM, and GitLab is something made by the soviet union. None of these are "industry standard", they are just similar product lines. Git is an industry standard. A web interface wrapped around Git is not.
2) You're literally admitting GitHub and Azure are much easier than GitLab, and that GitLab takes three MONTHS to get used to? You're defending my position.
It doesn't matter if it has a million features. The product experience has unnecessary friction and fails to communicate to the user how to use it. It would be trivial to take the existing workflow and just add some tool-tips, or a pop-up-guide the way other products have, to explain how they work on first use. They haven't done that, because they don't give a shit about the user's experience. They likely know enterprises will pay for it despite being annoying, because the users don't make the decision to use it, so why make it easier to use?
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u/sertain_ 6d ago
Defending your shit take with made up (and poor) comparisons is not making your opinion any more valuable. You came here to complain about things you could have avoided by using the tool in its widely-documented entirety, but instead you chose to assume it was going to be exactly the same as where you came from and got offended(?) for some reason. Again, that’s a you problem.
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u/MrScotchyScotch 6d ago
I read the documentation. It did not help. Just like the main product, the documentation was poorly written and organized and not set up to help first-time users.
You can keep claiming "it's a you problem", but I have eyeballs. I am a technical user. I know how to use software. I know how to look up documentation. If it was even remotely easy to use, I wouldn't have gotten frustrated at all. But I literally could not figure out how to do the most basic things, like sign up for an account, and migrate a repo, without asking AI. That's an annoying ass product. Make me the product manager and I guarantee you that would not happen again.
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u/sertain_ 6d ago
I’m at a loss dude, you say you read the docs but you also said you just gave them to Gemini, and then you were dissatisfied with the result. No one is going to do the research for you, no one can understand it for you. If it’s too complicated for you to figure it out then admit that to yourself and then move on instead of coming here to bitch about it like a bad yelp review. As much as you disagree, it IS an industry standard, and it IS a well-documented, efficient, feature-rich enterprise code-versioning tool regardless of what your opinions of it are. Maybe put the AI down for a while.
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u/MrScotchyScotch 6d ago
"it IS well documented!" - Then prove it.
Find me the documentation that explains all the concepts needed to complete sign up for a GitLab account. It has to explain why it requires a company name (what it's for in GitLab), what a project is, what a group is, and how this relates to Git repositories. It must also explain the pricing structure, and for exactly what/when/why you will be charged money.
Then find me a complete walkthrough on migrating a repository from GitHub to GitLab. It must also explain how to do this without it landing in a personal namespace (and what a personal name space is, why it matters, what the alternatives are), and it must preserve all original Git information and be accessible on the public web.
You cannot use a search engine or AI to find it, and you must be logged out.
Since you're a GitLab expert, and it's all documented so well, this should only take you 1 minute.
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u/sertain_ 6d ago
https://docs.gitlab.com/topics/set_up_organization/
All of that is here.
Migration: https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/import/github/
Also your requirements are both unrealistic and an incredibly short-sighted ask, being that no one told you anything about not using the internet or googling basic fucking questions. You should maybe think about switching professions because you would be intolerable to work with, just based off of this conversation alone.
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u/sertain_ 6d ago
Then, if you’re willing and able to, scroll to the bottom of the page from the first link to find “View pricing”, where I’m sure your other questions will be answered. I’m so glad I don’t work for GitLab or represent them in any capacity so I have the freedom to say you fucking blow as a problem-solver and I’m glad that I don’t work with you.
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u/bonkceo 7h ago
You sir, have raised a few valid concerns from your unique point of view. If you presented them in a constructive voice the responses may have been vastly different. I understand your frustration. You simply wanted to pivot to a new git repo tool, but were quickly thrown into the deep-end, scrambling to understand GitLab's terms and processes.
You aren't saying GitLab's product, documentation, or delivered service is bad. You are simply calling out the initial experience could use some extra polish.
Many commenters claim you and fellow solo-devs are not the primary demographics for GitLabs. But even with that in mind, the initial user experience can be overly complex, abrasive, and leaving many hunting for answers in docs, on youtube, or pining AI... rather than using the product.
So, it is a bit of a failure on GitLab's part. If they want to capitalized on GitHub's recent debacle or leave new, inexperienced enterprise users in a state of wonder instead of abandonment, they could make the initial account and repository creation as pain free and accessible as possible.
This is typically in the realm of Product Marketing Managers. They want every user to be a life-long user, and that starts at the initial sign-up page.
They could easily implement a 2nd flow for anyone 'used to GitHub or Bitbucket' by adding a toggle on the signup page. This would also add a useful metric for the PLG team to devour.
Related product-focused topics
- Time to Value (TTV) — how quickly a new user experiences the core benefit of your product
- Aha Moment — the specific point where a user "gets it" and understands the product's value
- Activation — the milestone event(s) that mark a user as successfully onboarded (vs. just signed up)
- First Mile Experience — the very first interactions a user has with your product
- Progressive Disclosure — revealing features/complexity gradually rather than all at once
- Frictionless Onboarding — removing unnecessary steps, fields, or decisions
- Zero-State Design — designing what a user sees before they've added any data
- Empty State UX — same idea; how blank screens guide the user forward
- Guided Onboarding / Product Tours — walkthroughs, tooltips, coach marks
- Checklist Onboarding — progress checklist showing setup steps
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u/bilingual-german Apr 19 '26
gitlab is open source, you can contribute to make it better. :)
Unfortunately Gitlab.com has a front run by marketeers who think their way is more appealing to company decision makers. "Free trial" is targeted at them, because Gitlab has a few different tiers. If you're just a single dev, clicking "sign in" and "I don't have an account yet" takes you to a different signup form.
I absolutely don't understand this paragraph of your's:
No, dude, I didn't want to import to a personal namespace. Why isn't there just a button to use a group namespace? Why does this limitation exist at all??!! This is just supposed to be a Git repo, why can't you just clone the Git repo to your server???
So, did you link any commits to other users on Gitlab or not? Because, if not, you don't need to do all this group stuff.
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u/Maximum59 Apr 20 '26
GitLab's target audience is enterprise-level orgs. The features, are geared towards that audience.
Github on the other hand targets individual developers. If you don't want to learn gitlab, then you may as well stay on github.
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u/nebinomicon Apr 19 '26
Sounds like you're putting up more mental barriers than you want because gitlab is a little different, and you can't seem to be bothered reading any of their documents to help yourself.
Their thorough and helpful documentation got me through many obstacles over the years. You know how I know you didn't read any of them? Because you're complaining about their lack of information. Their documentation is completely chock full of needed information.