I've been a Gitlab fan for a long time[0]. I typically default to GitHub for my repo slop[1], but if I'm doing something serious I put it in Gitlab. I like their CI setup better than GitHub and there's also self-host options if any of those "serious" projects ever needs that.
Also back in the day, you needed a paid account to make private repos on GitHub, but Gitlab made them free.
Anyway I haven't heard anyone complaining about Gitlab going down constantly, maybe just a function of not being the default slop-forge in the AI era, but still, they've been a long time friend to my constant hackery.
Also, Microsoft sucks.
[0]: over the years the UI has gotten a good bit more cluttered and annoying, so there's probably slicker stuff out there. But it's fine.
[1]: some of this is definitely vibe-coded LLM-vomit but I mean a more general type of slop in this case - random throwaway code, half baked ideas, etc.
I've used github for ~12 years, and it was fine for single repos, but it sucked _hard_ for any kind of organisation. It also sucked really hard for CI.
I joined a company that was using hosted gitlab. I really liked it, apart from it had the same uptime as github has now.
Features wise its about the same as github now, apart from organising repos is far simpler. Its not a flat list in an org, you can have sub teams in an org with thier repos neatly owned.
However the security story around them is not great, so I'm not really sure that I'd want to host a public instance of gitlab.
Yes! And for those complaining that gitlab CE selfhosted is resource hungry: It can be tuned to only use 2 GB memory in total and run perfectly fine for a single developer or limited concurrency. Gitlab CI is awesome.