The news of Microsoft buying GitHub has created dissatisfaction among developers, and many of them are now looking for alternatives. In case you are one of them, here is good news for you.
One of GitHub’s biggest rivals, GitLab, has seized this opportunity to attract even more developers to its platform by making its premium GitLab Ultimate plan and Gitlab Gold plan free for educational institutions and open source projects.
The Ultimate and Gold plans usually cost $99 per month for a single user and cover almost every useful feature a developer needs. While the GitLab Ultimate is a premium self-hosted plan, the Gold plan is a primary SaaS offering hosted on the company website.
Apart from including the basic features of GitLab Core, Starter and Premium services, both the plans offer advanced management and security features. These plans will let you access features like epics, roadmap, Kubernetes cluster monitoring, static application security testing, container scanning, etc.
The feature missing from these free plans is Support, but you can buy it at a heavily discounted price of $4.95 per month. Another limitation of these plans is that it is only applicable to schools but not individual students.
“We make GitLab free for education because we want students to use our most advanced features,” the company explained in its announcement. “We would love to have more open source projects use GitLab. With today’s announcement, open source projects that are comfortable running on proprietary software can use all the features GitLab.”
By charging non-open source projects, GitLab aims to maintain a sustainable business model.
