THREAD NECRO!!!
Anyone got thoughts on this company now? I forgot I have it on a watch list, and it seems to be increasing in stock price pretty steady.
Only thing I have to contribute right now is that earnings are Monday the 3rd supposedly.
I sold out of GitLab a year ago after the disastrous earnings in March 2023, during a period where I couldn’t be bothered to care much about my investments.
Since then I have only looked idly at the company but there are a few things to note from a high level perspective:
GitLab seems to be gaining popularity in corporations for its well integrated and well documented offering covering the entire software development lifecycle.
GitHub (the primary alternative to GitLab, owned by Microsoft) in the meantime still relies on 3rd party tools for many quality of life features built into GitLab. However, for what GitHub does offer, they clearly have far more innovation. First, GitHub has better support for web-based remote work. Second, they have a far stronger “AI copilot” offering, probably thanks to the backing of Microsoft.
Another point is that as of my initial analysis in 2022, the software community in general was still highly irritated at Microsoft taking over GitHub and GitLab was clear winner of those dissatisfied people (among both open source and corporate users). That feeling has since faded.
My take is that I would be cautious investing in GitLab but I would not avoid it either. Note that I have not looked at recent numbers or earnings transcripts! The “one-stop solution” offering for companies is very compelling in the corporate world and I don’t see any equivalent competitor in that regard. At the same time, I expect GitHub is gaining in popularity and that cannot be ignored.
If you do invest in GitLab, I would keep a close eye on what new features they offer and the user sentiment around those new features. The company needs more innovation if they are going to continue to grow. You might also look into if there are any metrics available for the use of GitLab vs GitHub.
I see that the last few days have been brutal to GTLB so you may no longer be interested. But if you look deeper into the company, please share anything you find.
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I would offer some additional anecdotal evidence to othalan’s response.
I have a friend who is a product manager at Github, they use google for all collaboration and have made further painstaking decisions to demonstrate their independence with Microsoft. I also asked if they would at some point replace Azure DevOps, which has many of the same capabilities for Enterprises and the answer was a resounding NO.
Lastly, I was working with a large enterprise to rip and replace their GitLab environment to Github. The reason was 2 fold, there was a compelling financial case and the second was that most of the cloud ops teams were using Github.
Again, everything stated here is anecdotal. Gitlab (or any other toolset in this space) has been a hard no, largely because I don’t see that the TAM is large enough.
I have received so much benefit from this board, I look for opportunities to provide any incite.
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