Top 5 Alternatives to GitLab in 2025

GitLab is an all-in-one, web-based DevOps platform that offers a complete solution for organizations to manage their software development lifecycle. GitLab provides an entire suite of tools, which includes a Git repository, built-in CI/CD pipelines, issue tracking, DevSecOps features, and Visibility (analytics & insights) capabilities. GitLab comes in both cloud-hosted service and self-managed installation options (Community & Enterprise Editions). GitLab's main advantage is its all-in-one approach that eliminates the need for multiple disconnected tools, reducing context switching and streamlining workflows for development teams who can manage code, deployment, and operations all within a single unified platform.

Why Look for a GitLab Alternative?

The Best thing about GitLab, its comprehensive all-in-one platform approach, but sometimes this turns out to be a double-edged sword for users. While offering a complete DevOps lifecycle within a single system creates streamlined workflows and reduces context switching, this integration can occasionally overwhelm new users with its complexity and learning curve.

• Complexity of the All-in-One Platform: GitLab's comprehensive platform covers the entire application lifecycle but can overwhelm teams with specialized needs. The extensive feature set often creates a steep learning curve, making it difficult for teams to effectively navigate, configure, and optimize only the components they require. 
• Resource-Intensive Infrastructure Requirements: GitLab's all-in-one approach demands significant computing resources, especially when self-hosted.
• No Native Support for GitOps: Despite GitLab's comprehensive DevOps capabilities, it lacks robust native GitOps implementation. Teams must integrate third-party tools like Argo CD separately to implement GitOps practices, adding complexity to management and creating potential synchronization issues between systems.

Key Evaluation Criteria for CI/CD Tools

When evaluating alternatives to Jenkins, consider these essential criteria to ensure the tool aligns with your organization's needs:

• Cloud-Native Architecture: The tool should be designed to work seamlessly with containerized environments and cloud infrastructure, supporting modern development practices.
• GitOps Support: Support for GitOps is essential, enabling teams to define, manage, and automate application deployments directly from Git repositories, improving consistency and transparency in the delivery process.
• Flexible CI/CD Workflows: The tool should enable developers to customize and adjust their pipelines to meet specific requirements. There should also be enough flexibility to integrate preferred tools into the CI/CD pipelines, allowing them to easily add or remove components without friction.
• Scalability: The ability to handle growing workloads without performance degradation, supporting concurrent builds and deployments.
• Unified Experience: The tool should offer a seamless, unified experience, eliminating the need for teams to switch between multiple tools. This reduces overhead work and minimizes the risk of errors.
• Security and Governance Features: Built-in security capabilities such as secrets management, access controls, and vulnerability scanning to enhance overall application security.

Top 5 GitLab Alternatives in 2025

Devtron

Devtron is an application lifecycle management platform that streamlines the management of cloud-native applications through a single, unified dashboard. Devtron comes with its native GitOps-enabled CI/CD pipelines designed to handle lightning-fast deployments while ensuring strong governance and reliability. 

Some of the features that make Devtron the best alternative for other CI/CD tools are:

1. Unified Dashboard: Devtron brings both CI and CD together in a central dashboard where you can manage deployments across multiple Kubernetes clusters. This single control point streamlines your workflow by allowing teams to monitor, control, and orchestrate all deployments from one place, eliminating the need to switch between different tools or interfaces.
2. Policy-Based Deployments: Devtron lets you connect your preferred security-scanning tools for vulnerability detection and allows you to create custom policies that enforce your compliance requirements.
3. Controlled Deployments: Devtron's features, like Deployment Windows, Deployment Approvals, and Lock Configurations, give you greater control over when and how changes are released. These safeguards help prevent potential disruptions in your production environments.
4. GitOps-Enabled Pipelines: You are day-1 GitOps enabled, making sure the best practices are followed along for deploying your application without worrying about setting up and managing tools like ArgoCD. 
5. Flexibility: Devtron CI/CD pipelines offer the flexibility to integrate tools of your choice. The pre- and post-build/deployment stages allow you to execute custom tasks before and after the CI and CD processes.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a CI/CD platform that allows you to automate the workflows (build, test, and deployment pipelines) directly within GitHub repositories. It allows developers to build, test, and deploy code without leaving the GitHub ecosystem, simplifying the entire process of CI and CD. To leverage the GitOps features, you need to integrate GitHub Actions with Argo CD, which adds some overhead work.  

Key features of GitHub Actions:

1. Workflow Automation: GitHub Actions allows you to automate the entire lifecycle of your software from code to deployments. Developers can simply create automated workflows in YAML format, with seamless integration with their GitHub repositories.
2. Event Driven Triggers: The automated workflows of GitHub actions can be remotely triggered and executed based on events on the GitHub repository, such as commits, pull requests, or an issue update, without any manual intervention.
3. GitHub Ecosystem: Being a part of GitHub, Actions benefit from seamless integration with the Git ecosystem, making it familiar and intuitive for developers. This reduces the learning curve significantly, as developers are already well-versed with Git tools and workflows.
4. Secret management: GitHub Actions provides a robust mechanism for managing secrets through variables. You can define secrets at various scopes, such as organizational or environment levels, ensuring secure and flexible handling of sensitive data.
5. Custom Runners: GitHub Actions offers GitHub-hosted runners for executing tasks but also allows you to self-host runners. This enables you to create tailored environments, such as air-gapped setups, for more specialized use cases.

Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source automation server that enables continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) through a robust plugin ecosystem. It allows teams to automate building, testing, and deploying software across various environments. In Jenkins, automation workflows are defined using Jenkinsfiles or through the web interface.

Key features of Jenkins:

1. Flexible Pipeline Automation Jenkins offers powerful pipeline capabilities through declarative or scripted pipelines defined in Jenkinsfiles. This flexibility enables teams to create complex workflows tailored to specific project requirements.
2. Extensive Plugin Ecosystem With thousands of plugins available, Jenkins can integrate with virtually any tool in the development stack. This extensibility allows teams to customize their automation environment to fit their exact needs.
3. Build Agent Distribution Jenkins supports distributed builds through its master-agent architecture, enabling workload distribution across multiple machines. This architecture helps teams scale their CI/CD infrastructure efficiently.
4. Scheduled Jobs and Triggers Beyond code commits, Jenkins supports various event triggers, including scheduled builds, external webhook events, and dependency-based pipeline initiations.

AWS Code Pipeline

AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps automate release pipelines for fast and reliable application updates. It integrates seamlessly with other AWS services and third-party tools. 

Key features of AWS CodePipeline:

1. Automated Release Process: AWS CodePipeline provides a fully managed continuous delivery service that automates the build, test, and deployment phases of your release process every time there's a code change. This automation enables rapid and reliable application updates by creating a standardized pipeline for code changes from source to production. 
2. AWS Integration: CodePipeline seamlessly integrates with other AWS services, creating a cohesive ecosystem for your development workflow. It works natively with services like CodeCommit for source control, CodeBuild for compilation and testing, CodeDeploy for deployment automation, and Lambda for custom processing steps.
3. Pipeline History & Status: CodePipeline provides comprehensive visibility into pipeline execution with detailed history tracking and real-time status monitoring. Teams can view the current state of each stage in active pipelines, monitor the progression of code changes, and receive notifications about pipeline events through Amazon SNS or CloudWatch Events.

Azure Pipeline

Azure Pipelines provides CI/CD services that work with any language, platform, and cloud. It enables teams to build, test, and deploy to any target, with parallel testing across multiple platforms. 

Key features of Azure Pipelines:

1. Advanced workflows and features: Azure Pipelines offers sophisticated workflow capabilities, including multi-stage pipelines with approval gates, environment targeting, and deployment strategies. Pipeline tasks can be sequenced in parallel or serial execution depending on dependencies, with capabilities for fan-out/fan-in patterns to optimize processing time.
2. Any language, any platform: Azure Pipelines provides extensive support for virtually any programming language, framework, or platform. The service can build, test, and deploy applications written in Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, and many other languages. 
3. Deploy to any cloud: Azure Pipelines enables deployment to multiple environments and cloud platforms, not just Azure services. The platform includes built-in deployment capabilities for Azure services like App Service and Kubernetes Service (AKS).
4. Advanced workflows and features: Azure Pipelines features a robust set of enterprise-ready capabilities, including release gates with automated quality checks, deployment approvals with role-based access control, and detailed audit trails.

Devtron vs GitLab: A Quick Comparison

Conclusion

In today's rapidly evolving DevOps landscape, organizations are increasingly seeking alternatives to GitLab that offer more specialized functionality, reduced complexity, and improved cloud-native support. The top GitLab alternatives in 2025—Devtron, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline, and Azure Pipelines—each bring unique strengths to address modern CI/CD challenges. Among these alternatives, Devtron distinctly stands out with its purpose-built Kubernetes integration, unified dashboard, and day-one GitOps enablement, eliminating the need for additional tools like ArgoCD that GitLab requires.

FAQ

Bhushan Nemade

Bhushan is an OSS Evangelist at Devtron with experience in promoting open-source adoption. He is an expert in DevOps ecosystems who actively contributes to and writes about open-source innovations.