GitLab vs Visual Studio Code

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GitLab vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Introduction

GitLab and Visual Studio Code are both widely used tools in the software development industry. While they serve different purposes, there are several key differences between the two. In this article, we will explore these differences in detail.

  1. Integration with Version Control Systems: GitLab is a web-based Git repository manager that provides a complete DevOps platform, allowing teams to collaborate on code, manage repositories, and automate CI/CD pipelines. On the other hand, Visual Studio Code is a lightweight source code editor that offers seamless integration with various version control systems, including Git. While GitLab provides a comprehensive platform for managing code repositories, Visual Studio Code focuses primarily on code editing and version control integration.

  2. Development Environment: GitLab offers a built-in development environment, known as the GitLab Development Kit (GDK), which allows developers to set up a complete development environment with all the necessary tools and dependencies. In contrast, Visual Studio Code is primarily a code editor and allows developers to customize their development environment by installing extensions for specific languages or frameworks. GitLab provides a more integrated and streamlined development environment, while Visual Studio Code offers flexibility and customization options.

  3. Collaboration and Project Management: GitLab provides features for collaboration and project management, including issue tracking, project boards, and merge request management. It offers a centralized platform for teams to collaborate on code, track project progress, and manage development workflows. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, focuses primarily on individual code editing and does not provide built-in features for project management or collaboration. It is often used in conjunction with other tools, such as GitLab, for team collaboration and project management.

  4. Extensions and Customization: Visual Studio Code offers a wide range of extensions that can be installed to enhance its functionality and support various programming languages and frameworks. These extensions provide additional features, such as code linting, debugging, and integrated terminals. GitLab, being a web-based platform, does not offer the same level of customization and extension support as Visual Studio Code. While GitLab provides a comprehensive set of features, it may not have the same level of flexibility for customization as Visual Studio Code.

  5. Deployment and Infrastructure Management: GitLab provides built-in features for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), allowing teams to automate the build, test, and deployment processes. It also offers Kubernetes integration for managing containerized applications. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, focuses primarily on code editing and does not provide built-in features for deployment or infrastructure management. It is typically used in conjunction with other tools, such as GitLab's CI/CD pipelines or cloud platforms like Azure, for deploying and managing applications.

  6. Accessibility and Platform Support: Visual Studio Code is a cross-platform code editor and is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. It provides a consistent experience across different platforms and can be easily set up on various environments. GitLab, being a web-based platform, is accessible from any device with a web browser and an internet connection. It does not require any installation or setup on individual machines. GitLab offers more accessibility and platform independence compared to Visual Studio Code.

In summary, GitLab is a comprehensive web-based platform for code management, collaboration, and CI/CD, providing a complete DevOps solution. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, is a lightweight code editor with seamless version control integration and extensive customization options. While GitLab focuses on providing an integrated development environment and project management features, Visual Studio Code offers flexibility and customization for developers.

Decisions about GitLab and Visual Studio Code
Elmar Wouters
CEO, Managing Director at Wouters Media · | 7 upvotes · 495.5K views

I first used BitBucket because it had private repo's, and it didn't disappoint me. Also with the smooth integration of Jira, the decision to use BitBucket as a full application maintenance service was as easy as 1, 2, 3.

I honestly love BitBucket, by the looks, by the UI, and the smooth integration with Tower.

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Samriddhi Sinha
Machine Learning Engineer at Chefling · | 6 upvotes · 975.3K views

Lightweight and versatile. Huge library of extensions that enable you to integrate a host of services to your development environment. VS Code's biggest strength is its library of extensions which enables it to directly compete with every single major IDE for almost all major programming languages.

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Weverton Timoteo

Do you review your Pull/Merge Request before assigning Reviewers?

If you work in a team opening a Pull Request (or Merge Request) looks appropriate. However, have you ever thought about opening a Pull/Merge Request when working by yourself? Here's a checklist of things you can review in your own:

  • Pick the correct target branch
  • Make Drafts explicit
  • Name things properly
  • Ask help for tools
  • Remove the noise
  • Fetch necessary data
  • Understand Mergeability
  • Pass the message
  • Add screenshots
  • Be found in the future
  • Comment inline in your changes

Read the blog post for more detailed explanation for each item :D

What else do you review before asking for code review?

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Weverton Timoteo

Using an inclusive language is crucial for fostering a diverse culture. Git has changed the naming conventions to be more language-inclusive, and so you should change. Our development tools, like GitHub and GitLab, already supports the change.

SourceLevel deals very nicely with repositories that changed the master branch to a more appropriate word. Besides, you can use the grep linter the look for exclusive terms contained in the source code.

As the inclusive language gap may happen in other aspects of our lives, have you already thought about them?

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Weverton Timoteo

One of the magic tricks git performs is the ability to rewrite log history. You can do it in many ways, but git rebase -i is the one I most use. With this command, It’s possible to switch commits order, remove a commit, squash two or more commits, or edit, for instance.

It’s particularly useful to run it before opening a pull request. It allows developers to “clean up” the mess and organize commits before submitting to review. If you follow the practice 3 and 4, then the list of commits should look very similar to a task list. It should reveal the rationale you had, telling the story of how you end up with that final code.

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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 12 upvotes · 1.3M views

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 8 upvotes · 661.8K views

Out of most of the VCS solutions out there, we found Gitlab was the most feature complete with a free community edition. Their DevSecops offering is also a very robust solution. Gitlab CI/CD was quite easy to setup and the direct integration with your VCS + CI/CD is also a bonus. Out of the box integration with major cloud providers, alerting through instant messages etc. are all extremely convenient. We push our CI/CD updates to MS Teams.

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Gitlab as A LOT of features that GitHub and Azure DevOps are missing. Even if both GH and Azure are backed by Microsoft, GitLab being open source has a faster upgrade rate and the hosted by gitlab.com solution seems more appealing than anything else! Quick win: the UI is way better and the Pipeline is way easier to setup on GitLab!

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Simon Ibssa
Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo · | 2 upvotes · 1.2M views

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

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Nazar Atamaniuk
Shared insights
on
DeployPlaceDeployPlaceGitHubGitHubGitLabGitLab

At DeployPlace we use self-hosted GitLab, we have chosen GitLab as most of us are familiar with it. We are happy with all features GitLab provides, I can’t imagine our life without integrated GitLab CI. Another important feature for us is integrated code review tool, we use it every day, we use merge requests, code reviews, branching. To be honest, most of us have GitHub accounts as well, we like to contribute in open source, and we want to be a part of the tech community, but lack of solutions from GitHub in the area of CI doesn’t let us chose it for our projects.

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Pros of GitLab
Pros of Visual Studio Code
  • 508
    Self hosted
  • 430
    Free
  • 339
    Has community edition
  • 242
    Easy setup
  • 240
    Familiar interface
  • 137
    Includes many features, including ci
  • 113
    Nice UI
  • 84
    Good integration with gitlabci
  • 57
    Simple setup
  • 34
    Free private repository
  • 34
    Has an official mobile app
  • 31
    Continuous Integration
  • 22
    Open source, great ui (like github)
  • 18
    Slack Integration
  • 14
    Full CI flow
  • 11
    Free and unlimited private git repos
  • 10
    User, group, and project access management is simple
  • 9
    All in one (Git, CI, Agile..)
  • 8
    Built-in CI
  • 8
    Intuitive UI
  • 6
    Both public and private Repositories
  • 6
    Full DevOps suite with Git
  • 5
    Build/pipeline definition alongside code
  • 5
    CI
  • 5
    So easy to use
  • 5
    Integrated Docker Registry
  • 5
    It's powerful source code management tool
  • 4
    Issue system
  • 4
    Dockerized
  • 4
    Unlimited free repos & collaborators
  • 4
    Security and Stable
  • 4
    On-premises
  • 4
    It's fully integrated
  • 4
    Mattermost Chat client
  • 4
    Excellent
  • 3
    Great for team collaboration
  • 3
    Built-in Docker Registry
  • 3
    Low maintenance cost due omnibus-deployment
  • 3
    I like the its runners and executors feature
  • 3
    Free private repos
  • 3
    Because is the best remote host for git repositories
  • 3
    Not Microsoft Owned
  • 3
    Opensource
  • 2
    Groups of groups
  • 2
    Powerful software planning and maintaining tools
  • 2
    Review Apps feature
  • 2
    Kubernetes integration with GitLab CI
  • 2
    It includes everything I need, all packaged with docker
  • 2
    Multilingual interface
  • 2
    HipChat intergration
  • 2
    Powerful Continuous Integration System
  • 2
    One-click install through DigitalOcean
  • 2
    The dashboard with deployed environments
  • 2
    Native CI
  • 2
    Many private repo
  • 2
    Kubernetes Integration
  • 2
    Published IP list for whitelisting (gl-infra#434)
  • 2
    Wounderful
  • 2
    Beautiful
  • 1
    Supports Radius/Ldap & Browser Code Edits
  • 340
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 308
    Fast
  • 193
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
  • 126
    Git integration
  • 106
    Intellisense
  • 78
    Faster than Atom
  • 53
    Better ui, easy plugins, and nice git integration
  • 45
    Great Refactoring Tools
  • 44
    Good Plugins
  • 42
    Terminal
  • 38
    Superb markdown support
  • 36
    Open Source
  • 35
    Extensions
  • 26
    Awesome UI
  • 26
    Large & up-to-date extension community
  • 24
    Powerful and fast
  • 22
    Portable
  • 18
    Best editor
  • 18
    Best code editor
  • 17
    Easy to get started with
  • 15
    Lots of extensions
  • 15
    Good for begginers
  • 15
    Crossplatform
  • 15
    Built on Electron
  • 14
    Open, cross-platform, fast, monthly updates
  • 14
    Extensions for everything
  • 14
    All Languages Support
  • 13
    Easy to use and learn
  • 12
    Extensible
  • 12
    "fast, stable & easy to use"
  • 11
    Ui design is great
  • 11
    Useful for begginer
  • 11
    Totally customizable
  • 11
    Git out of the box
  • 11
    Faster edit for slow computer
  • 10
    SSH support
  • 10
    Great community
  • 10
    Fast Startup
  • 9
    Great language support
  • 9
    It has terminal and there are lots of shortcuts in it
  • 9
    Works With Almost EveryThing You Need
  • 9
    Powerful Debugger
  • 8
    Can compile and run .py files
  • 8
    Python extension is fast
  • 7
    Great document formater
  • 7
    Features rich
  • 6
    He is not Michael
  • 6
    Awesome multi cursor support
  • 6
    She is not Rachel
  • 6
    Extension Echosystem
  • 5
    VSCode.pro Course makes it easy to learn
  • 5
    SFTP Workspace
  • 5
    Very proffesional
  • 5
    Language server client
  • 5
    Easy azure
  • 4
    Has better support and more extentions for debugging
  • 4
    Supports lots of operating systems
  • 4
    Virtualenv integration
  • 4
    Excellent as git difftool and mergetool
  • 3
    Emmet preinstalled
  • 3
    More tools to integrate with vs
  • 3
    Has more than enough languages for any developer
  • 3
    Better autocompletes than Atom
  • 3
    'batteries included'
  • 2
    Microsoft
  • 2
    Light
  • 2
    Big extension marketplace
  • 2
    CMake support with autocomplete
  • 2
    Fast and ruby is built right in
  • 2
    VS Code Server: Browser version of VS Code
  • 2
    Customizable

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Cons of GitLab
Cons of Visual Studio Code
  • 28
    Slow ui performance
  • 8
    Introduce breaking bugs every release
  • 6
    Insecure (no published IP list for whitelisting)
  • 2
    Built-in Docker Registry
  • 1
    Review Apps feature
  • 46
    Slow startup
  • 29
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 13
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools
  • 10
    Poor autocomplete
  • 8
    Super Slow
  • 8
    Huge cpu usage with few installed extension
  • 8
    Microsoft sends telemetry data
  • 7
    Poor in PHP
  • 6
    It's MicroSoft
  • 3
    Poor in Python
  • 3
    No Built in Browser Preview
  • 3
    No color Intergrator
  • 3
    Very basic for java development and buggy at times
  • 3
    No built in live Preview
  • 3
    Electron
  • 2
    Bad Plugin Architecture
  • 2
    Powered by Electron
  • 1
    Terminal does not identify path vars sometimes
  • 1
    Slow C++ Language Server

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What is GitLab?

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.

What is Visual Studio Code?

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

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What are some alternatives to GitLab and Visual Studio Code?
GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.
Bitbucket
Bitbucket gives teams one place to plan projects, collaborate on code, test and deploy, all with free private Git repositories. Teams choose Bitbucket because it has a superior Jira integration, built-in CI/CD, & is free for up to 5 users.
Jenkins
In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
Gogs
The goal of this project is to make the easiest, fastest and most painless way to set up a self-hosted Git service. With Go, this can be done in independent binary distribution across ALL platforms that Go supports, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
See all alternatives