Choosing GitHub: A Comprehensive Comparison

In Part 1, we covered why we moved away from BitBucket and Estafette. This post picks up where we left off - walking through the evaluation that led us to GitHub.

The Selection Criteria

Before diving into vendor comparisons, we defined what mattered most. A new SCM and CI/CD platform needed to deliver on five fronts:

1. Equitable cost - fair pricing relative to features, scalable as we grow
2. Better pipeline performance - faster builds, better caching, flexible syntax
3. Improved security - dependency scanning, secret management, access control
4. Lower maintenance overhead - easier runner management, better admin tooling
5. Developer experience - strong API/CLI, IDE integration, community ecosystem

Given the market landscape, we narrowed our evaluation to GitHub and GitLab. Both are mature, widely adopted platforms with strong CI/CD capabilities. The question was which one fits our needs better.

Cost Comparison

Cost was a major factor. With around 187 developers and 2.46 million CI/CD minutes per year, even small per-unit differences add up fast.

Base Pricing

We compared GitHub Enterprise with Advanced Security against GitLab Ultimate - the tiers that include the security features we needed.

Both platforms include 600,000 free CI/CD minutes. For the remaining 1.86 million minutes, GitHub's lower per-minute rate gave us additional savings.

Three-Year Projection with Discounts

Both vendors offered volume discounts. Here's how the three-year commitment shaped up:

GitHub came in $149K cheaper over three years. And that's before accounting for Snyk - GitLab Ultimate includes basic dependency scanning, but GitHub's Advanced Security covers that, so we'd save an additional $51K per year on Snyk licenses with GitHub.

Scaling Costs

We also modeled what happens as CI/CD usage grows. If our minutes doubled or tripled:

GitHub's lower per-minute pricing means the cost advantage grows as we scale.

Pipeline Performance

Faster pipelines mean faster feedback loops, which directly impacts developer productivity. We ran the same workloads on both platforms and measured the differences.

Hardware and Execution Speed

GitHub's hosted runners come with better specs out of the box:

The hardware difference showed in real builds. For most of our Java applications, GitHub builds were noticeably faster - sometimes even without cache. GitLab also added nearly a minute of overhead per job just preparing the environment and uploading artifacts.

Caching

Caching was a clear differentiator:

• GitLab: Cache only works within the same tagged runner. Clearing cache means wiping all cache for the entire pipeline - no way to remove a single key.
• GitHub: Cache works out of the box across both hosted and self-hosted runners. You can manage individual cache keys and see the size of each one.

Pipeline Syntax

GitHub Actions offers meaningful advantages in how you structure CI/CD workflows:

• Multiple YAML files - Each workflow is a separate file with its own trigger events. In GitLab, everything goes into a single .gitlab-ci.yml, making it harder to navigate at scale.
• Reusable components - GitHub Actions and reusable workflows let teams share build logic without copy-pasting YAML.
• No runtime conflicts - Job and step names are scoped properly, avoiding naming collisions that can happen in GitLab.
• Rich expressions - Extensive conditional logic for controlling when jobs and steps run.

Data Sharing Between Jobs

Both platforms support artifact upload/download for sharing files between jobs. But GitHub also has a context mechanism that lets you pass string key-value pairs directly between jobs and steps - no need to write and read Dotenv files like in GitLab.

Security

Security was where the evaluation got nuanced. Each platform has genuine strengths.

Where GitLab Wins: Integrated Scanning

GitLab Ultimate bundles container scanning, dependency scanning, SAST, and runtime scanning out of the box. It also provides a security dashboard and can scan containerized workloads via its cluster agent. GitHub provides similar features through Advanced Security, but they require more configuration through Actions.

Where GitHub Wins: Secret Management

GitHub has two critical features GitLab lacks:

• Secret push prevention - GitHub scans every push for accidentally committed secrets and blocks them before they reach the repository. GitLab doesn't offer this.
• Google Secret Manager integration - GitHub has an official Action maintained by Google for fetching secrets, plus a Google-maintained Action for Workload Identity Federation (WIF). GitLab's WIF support was still in alpha at the time of our evaluation.

Cloud Access Control

Both platforms handle cloud and cluster access, but through different approaches. GitHub has official Google Actions for WIF and GKE cluster access. GitLab has a native cluster agent. Neither platform had a decisive advantage here.

Maintenance and Developer Experience

SCM Administration

Both platforms cover the basics, but with different strengths:

• GitHub offers custom roles and individual status checks on pull requests
• GitLab has better IdP integration out of the box

Runner Management

GitLab has the edge here. Its runners fit naturally into our existing GKE clusters and infrastructure, making self-hosted runner management straightforward.

Developer Tooling

GitHub wins on developer experience:

• Native VSCode integration with full-screen mode, timestamp toggle, and fine-grained API access
• GitHub Codespaces for ephemeral cloud development environments
• GitHub CLI (gh) for managing PRs, issues, Actions, and more from the terminal
• GitHub Copilot integration for AI-assisted development

GitLab provides a web IDE but needs third-party integration (like Gitpod) for cloud development environments.

Ecosystem and Community

GitHub has a significantly larger ecosystem:

• GitHub Marketplace with thousands of Actions and Apps maintained by the community and major vendors
• Extensive third-party integrations - most SaaS tools offer first-class GitHub support
• Community platform where multiple organizations maintain and support shared tooling

The Verdict

Here's how the evaluation stacked up:

GitHub won in 8 categories, GitLab in 2, with 2 ties. Combined with the $149K cost savings over three years, the decision was clear.

Conclusion

Moving to a managed CI/CD platform was the right call for our team. The evaluation confirmed that GitHub Enterprise with Advanced Security gives us the best combination of cost efficiency, pipeline performance, security coverage, and developer experience.

GitLab is a strong platform - its integrated security scanning and runner management are genuinely excellent. But for a team our size, with our infrastructure and growth trajectory, GitHub was the better fit across the board.

In the next post, Managing GitHub at Enterprise Scale with Terraform, we cover how we built a self-service platform to manage 400+ repositories, 27 teams, and security policies using infrastructure as code.