Appveyor vs GitLab: What are the differences?
What is Appveyor? Continuous Integration and Deployment service for busy Windows developers. AppVeyor aims to give powerful Continuous Integration and Deployment tools to every .NET developer without the hassle of setting up and maintaining their own build server.
What is GitLab? Open source self-hosted Git management software. GitLab offers git repository management, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds and wikis. Enterprises install GitLab on-premise and connect it with LDAP and Active Directory servers for secure authentication and authorization. A single GitLab server can handle more than 25,000 users but it is also possible to create a high availability setup with multiple active servers.
Appveyor belongs to "Continuous Integration" category of the tech stack, while GitLab can be primarily classified under "Code Collaboration & Version Control".
Some of the features offered by Appveyor are:
- Scriptless, repetitive, one-click deployment of build artifacts to multiple environments
- YAML configuration
- Backed by Windows Azure platform
On the other hand, GitLab provides the following key features:
- Manage git repositories with fine grained access controls that keep your code secure
- Perform code reviews and enhance collaboration with merge requests
- Each project can also have an issue tracker and a wiki
"Github integration" is the primary reason why developers consider Appveyor over the competitors, whereas "Self hosted" was stated as the key factor in picking GitLab.
GitLab is an open source tool with 20.1K GitHub stars and 5.33K GitHub forks. Here's a link to GitLab's open source repository on GitHub.
Alibaba.com, Freelancer.com, and Electronic Arts are some of the popular companies that use GitLab, whereas Appveyor is used by Exceptionless, Oconics, and Snipcart. GitLab has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1219 company stacks & 1431 developers stacks; compared to Appveyor, which is listed in 19 company stacks and 16 developer stacks.