GitLab Pricing
- Development pricing
- $29/mo at the smallest
- Free plan
GitLab pricing starts at $29 a month, which is $348 over twelve months. There is a free plan, and a trial on the paid tiers: 30 days on Ultimate. Every figure below was read from the vendor's pricing page on 9 August 2026.
Opens the vendor's own pricing page. Figures here were read from it on 9 August 2026.
GitLab ranking and coverage
- In Development
- #8 of 18
- Overall
- #48 of 122 tied
- Terms score
- 5.9 /10
- Referenced here
- 2 pages
Cost position 0.6 · Portability 8 · Subscription flexibility 9 - Ranked on published terms only: entry price against category peers, portability and subscription flexibility, equally weighted. This is not a quality score.How the rank is calculated.
GitLab pricing at a glance
| Entry price | Free tier available; Premium $29 per user/month billed annually |
|---|---|
| Smallest invoice | $29 a month, or $348 a year |
| How that is reached | Premium at $29 a month |
| Seat minimum | None on the entry plan |
| Free plan | Yes |
| Free trial | 30 days on Ultimate |
| How it charges | freemium |
| Priced plans published | 3 rows on the vendor's page |
| Affiliate programme | No |
| Prices read from | The vendor's own pricing page |
| Last checked | 9 August 2026 |
Every GitLab plan and what it costs
Read from the vendor's own pricing page on 9 August 2026. Charged as freemium. Free trial: 30 days on Ultimate.
| Plan | Price | Billing | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | per month | per user - Unlimited repositories, 400 compute minutes per month |
| Premium | $29 | per month | per user, billed annually - 10,000 compute minutes, includes $12 GitLab Credits per user per month |
| Ultimate | Contact sales | Negotiated | Advanced security scanning, compliance and portfolio management |
What GitLab actually costs over a year
A monthly price is not the same thing as a monthly contract. These are the plans above resolved both ways, per seat or unit where the plan is charged that way. Where a vendor quotes only a yearly figure it is divided by twelve rather than left out, and the Quoted column says which figure the vendor actually publishes.
| Plan | Quoted | Monthly | Over 12 months |
|---|---|---|---|
| Premiumper user, billed annually | per month | $29 | $348 |
GitLab pricing against its competitors
Compared on the smallest invoice each vendor will accept, not on the advertised per-seat rate. Where a product has a seat minimum, the figure below is the minimum times the rate, because that is the cheque you would actually write.
| Product | Cheapest paid entry | Free plan | Against GitLab |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub | $4 a month | Yes | −$25 a month (−86%) |
| GitLab | $29 a month | Yes | This product |
Which GitLab plan should you buy?
| Your situation | Recommended | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You want source control and CI at no cost | Free | Unlimited repositories, but only 400 compute minutes a month, which is the binding constraint rather than repository count. |
| You need real CI capacity and one integrated platform | Premium | $29 per user billed annually with 10,000 compute minutes and $12 of GitLab Credits per user a month. |
| You need security scanning and compliance management | Ultimate | Quote only, and the tier where GitLab's DevSecOps positioning actually applies. |
| You must keep source code on your own infrastructure | Self-managed, any tier | GitLab can be self-hosted at every tier including Free, which is its clearest advantage over GitHub. |
| You run an open-source project seeking contributors | Do not choose GitLab | Contributors are on GitHub. This is a distribution question, not a features one. |
Verdict by who you are
Organisation needing self-hosted source controlYes
Self-hosting at every tier, including free, is the decisive difference. GitHub gates this to enterprise.
Team consolidating DevOps toolingYes
Source control, CI/CD, security scanning and issues in one product genuinely reduces sprawl.
Open-source maintainerNo
Outside contribution happens on GitHub. Everything else is secondary to that.
Small team on the free tierCompare first
400 compute minutes is tight. Model your CI usage before assuming free is workable.
Team whose tooling assumes GitHubNo
Integration gravity is real, and fighting it costs more than the licence difference.
Should you buy GitLab?
Buy GitLab if…
- Teams wanting source control, CI/CD and security in one product
- Organisations that must self-host for compliance or data residency
- Companies consolidating a sprawl of separate DevOps tools
Do not buy GitLab if…
- Open-source projects needing outside contributors
- Teams whose ecosystem and integrations all assume GitHub
- Small teams for whom the free tier's compute is enough elsewhere
What leaving GitLab would cost
low lock-in
GitLab scores on self-hostable, public API. Portability 8/10 ; lock-in is the inverse. How this is calculated.
Self-hosting is the decisive feature
For most teams this is a preference. For defence, healthcare, finance and government it is a requirement, and GitLab is the only mainstream option that lets you run the whole platform, including CI/CD and security scanning, inside your own network at any tier. GitHub offers this only through Enterprise Server. If data residency is a constraint, the comparison largely ends here.
The price gap against GitHub is real
Premium is $29 per user per month. GitHub Team is $4 and Enterprise is $21. That difference needs justifying, and the honest justification is scope: GitLab Premium includes CI/CD minutes, security features and planning tools that GitHub charges for separately or does not include. Compare total spend across your whole toolchain rather than the seat price alone.
Ultimate is now a sales conversation
At the time we checked, Ultimate no longer carries a published price and routes to a contact form. Since Ultimate is where the advanced security scanning, compliance frameworks and portfolio management live, security-led buyers should budget time for procurement rather than expecting a self-serve rate.
Compute minutes, as always
Free includes 400 compute minutes a month and Premium 10,000, with Premium also carrying $12 in GitLab Credits per user per month. As with every hosted CI product, a busy pipeline consumes these faster than expected. If your builds are heavy, price additional compute or plan to attach your own runners, which GitLab supports well.
Where GitHub still wins
Anything involving people outside your organisation. Contributors have GitHub accounts, tooling integrates with GitHub first, and candidates arrive with a GitHub profile. If your work is public or your hiring depends on it, that network is worth more than the technical consolidation GitLab offers.
GitLab questions, answered
- Is GitLab worth it?
- GitLab's proposition is coherence. Source control, pipelines, security scanning, registries and deployment are one product with one permission model, rather than five tools joined by webhooks, and for a platform team tha
- How much does GitLab cost?
- Free tier available; Premium $29 per user/month billed annually. The cheapest paid tier we recorded is Premium, published at $29 a month, which works out at $29 a month or $348 over a year. Verified against the vendor's pricing page.
- Does GitLab have a free plan or free trial?
- GitLab has a free plan. A free trial is available: 30 days on Ultimate.
- What is the best GitLab alternative?
- It depends on the job. GitHub: Larger network and ecosystem, and the default for open source. Bitbucket: Sensible where the organisation already runs Atlassian tools. Gitea or Forgejo: Lightweight self-hosted Git without the wider DevOps platform.
- Can I self-host GitLab?
- Yes. GitLab can be run on your own infrastructure, so the data stays under your control.
Opens the vendor's own pricing page. Figures here were read from it on 9 August 2026.
What this profile is based on
Every claim below is about our work, not about GitLab. A "no" is recorded rather than omitted, because the difference between a tested review and careful desk research is the reader's to weigh. How we research a profile.
-
Prices read from the vendor : yes
Read from GitLab's own pricing page on 9 August 2026
-
Plans and terms recorded : yes
3 rows, each with its billing period
-
Original screenshots : yes
2 captured by us: pricing page, homepage
-
Sources cited and dated : yes
1 primary source, each with the date it was read
-
Product used first-hand : no
Not tested. This profile is desk research from primary sources
-
Alternatives used first-hand : no
None, so comparisons here rest on published facts rather than use
-
Vendor contacted : no
Not contacted for this profile
Where GitLab appears on this site
2 other pages here reference GitLab. Every one is listed below, so the figure can be checked rather than taken.
Counts pages on this site that name the product by choice - price guides, pricing question pages, deal records and other profiles. Category and directory indexes list everything automatically and are not counted.
One-click Google setting
Get our writing surfaced first on Google
If this was useful, add EveryAny.One as a preferred source in Google. Our pricing pages and price guides will appear ahead of the rest in Top Stories, AI Mode and AI Overviews when you search for what software costs.
- Our reviews get a "preferred" badge in Top Stories and AI Overviews.
- AI Mode leans on the sources you've chosen when it answers.
- Change it back any time from the same Google page.
Opens Google's source preferences in a new tab.
Provenance and freshness
When each fact was last checked
- Pricing ·
- Plans ·
- Free trial
- Features
- Platforms
- Integrations
- Affiliate programme
- Company details
What has changed
-
August 2026
- Per-user pricing and compute minute allowances verified
- Added plan picker and verdicts
Sources & verification
Facts on this page were read from the sources below on the dates shown. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, we record it as not disclosed rather than estimating it.
- GitLab pricing - checked 9 August 2026
Spotted something out of date? Email [email protected] and we will re-check it. Corrections are logged on the page.
