GitHub Actions vs GitLab CI — Full Comparison

We run pipelines on both, for different clients, and the choice almost never comes down to which YAML dialect is prettier. It comes down to where your code already lives and how many separate vendors you're willing to pay and babysit. Everything else is detail. But the details bite, so here they are.

How you write the config#

GitHub Actions splits work into workflows made of jobs and steps. The good steps are usually somebody else's, pulled from the Marketplace with uses:. That's the whole personality of the platform: you glue together published actions instead of writing shell.

# .github/workflows/ci.yml
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with: { node-version: 20 }
      - run: npm ci && npm test

GitLab CI is one file, .gitlab-ci.yml, organized around stages that run in order. It leans more on scripts you write yourself and less on a marketplace. Jobs in the same stage run in parallel, then the next stage starts.

# .gitlab-ci.yml
stages: [test, build]
test:
  stage: test
  image: node:20
  script:
    - npm ci
    - npm test

Both support reusable config (composite/reusable workflows on GitHub, include: and extends: on GitLab). GitLab's single-file model is easier to reason about on day one. GitHub's marketplace saves you real time by the second week, because someone already solved the thing you were about to write.

One vendor or an ecosystem#

This is the actual fork in the road. GitLab ships as one product: source control, CI, a container registry, package registry, security scanning, and issue tracking, all behind one login and one permissions model. You turn on SAST or dependency scanning by adding a template line, and results land in the merge request.

GitHub does it as an ecosystem. Actions is the CI piece; Packages is the registry; security scanning comes through Advanced Security and Dependabot; and anything past that is a Marketplace app or a third-party integration. More choice, more moving parts, more bills.

If you want fewer vendors and fewer integration seams, GitLab's bundle is the honest win. If you already live on GitHub and treat CI as one job among many, the ecosystem is fine.

Runners#

Both give you hosted runners and let you register your own. GitHub's hosted fleet covers Linux, Windows, and macOS, including larger CPU/RAM sizes on paid plans. GitLab offers hosted runners too (including macOS and GPU options) and has always made self-managed runners a first-class path, which matters when you run GitLab on your own hardware.

Self-hosted is where teams end up once the minutes bill stings or the compliance team asks where builds execute. Both do it well. GitLab's runner has a slightly longer history of people running big self-managed fleets.

Pricing, roughly#

Neither is simple, so read the current pages before you commit. The shape:

GitHub bills actual minutes, with a multiplier for bigger or non-Linux runners; Windows and macOS eat your allowance fast. GitLab bills compute minutes with a factor per runner type, and hosted macOS costs more. Both include a free monthly bucket that private repos burn through quickly. On self-hosted runners, compute is your infrastructure and the platform minute meter mostly stops mattering.

Environments, review apps, and gates#

GitLab's review apps are the standout: spin up a live preview of a branch, linked from the merge request, torn down on merge. GitHub can do the same, but you assemble it from actions and a deploy target rather than getting it as a named feature. Both support protected environments with approval gates before production deploys. If per-branch preview environments are core to how you review, GitLab hands you more out of the box.

Speed#

On clean runs they're close, and your pipeline design drives the number far more than the vendor. Caching, artifact passing, and job parallelism decide it. GitHub's fan-out with matrix builds is clean; GitLab's stage model is easy to reason about but can serialize more than you'd like if you don't use needs: to build a DAG. Neither is meaningfully faster once you've tuned the pipeline. Anyone selling you on raw speed is selling.

Ecosystem#

GitHub's Marketplace is the biggest single reason people stay. There's a published action for almost everything, which turns a lot of pipeline work into copy-paste. GitLab counters with maintained templates for scanning, deploys, and language stacks, but the catalog is smaller and you write more of your own scripts. More glue on GitHub, more first-party plumbing on GitLab.

If you're still weighing the field beyond these two, our roundup of the best CI/CD platform options covers the rest.

The call we'd make#

Follow the code. If your repos are on GitHub, use Actions. Fighting that gravity to save a few dollars in minutes is a bad trade, and the Marketplace pays you back weekly. If you want one vendor doing SCM, CI, registry, and security under one roof, or you need to run the whole thing on your own hardware, GitLab is the cleaner answer and its bundled security and review apps are genuinely nice to have. For a greenfield team that hates integration sprawl, we lean GitLab. For everyone already on GitHub, stop overthinking it and turn on Actions.