GitLab began in 2011 as an open-source project to help one team of programmers collaborate, and grew into a platform used by millions. Its own company page describes that origin directly: “What started in 2011 as an open source project to help one team of programmers collaborate is now the intelligent orchestration platform millions of people use.” The first commit to the GitLab open-source project dates to October 8, 2011.
Unlike rivals that stitched together separate services, GitLab pursued a single-application model: one tool covering source code management, code review (merge requests), CI/CD, and issue tracking, spanning the work “from planning to production.” This open-core approach, with a freely available core and paid tiers on top, became its main point of difference from GitHub.
GitLab the company was built around the project and is notable for being all-remote. It lists “0 Offices” and has operated with a fully distributed workforce since its beginning, documenting how it works in a public handbook. Co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij described this firsthand when the company went public in 2021, reporting roughly 1,350 team members across more than 65 countries and no physical headquarters.
That combination, an open-source-rooted, single-application DevOps platform run by an all-remote, radically transparent company, made GitLab GitHub’s principal competitor and one of the defining tools of the modern software-delivery era.