GitLab Inc. (GitLab) operates as a technology company.
The company operates on an all-remote model. The company’s primary offering is ‘GitLab’, a complete DevSecOps platform delivered as a single application. GitLab is used by a wide range of organizations. The company also provides related training and professional services. GitLab is offered on both self-managed and software-as-a-service (‘SaaS’) models. The principal markets for GitLab are in the United States, Europe, and the Asia Pacific....
GitLab Inc. (GitLab) operates as a technology company.
The company operates on an all-remote model. The company’s primary offering is ‘GitLab’, a complete DevSecOps platform delivered as a single application. GitLab is used by a wide range of organizations. The company also provides related training and professional services. GitLab is offered on both self-managed and software-as-a-service (‘SaaS’) models. The principal markets for GitLab are in the United States, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. The company is focused on accelerating innovation and broadening the distribution of its platform to companies across the world to help them become better software-led businesses.
Built with a unified data model, the company’s platform brings together all stakeholders in the software delivery lifecycle – from development teams to operations teams to security teams. With GitLab, all stakeholders can build better, more secure software, faster.
GitLab offers the shortest path to unlock technology transformation and business value. GitLab accelerates the company’s customers’ ability to innovate by accelerating their software development from weeks to minutes. It removes the need for point tools and delivers enhanced operational efficiency by eliminating manual work, increasing productivity, and creating a culture of innovation and velocity. Embedding security earlier in the development process, GitLab enables customers to improve software security, quality, and overall compliance.
The company has more than 50 million registered users, and more than 50% of the Fortune 100 companies are GitLab customers.
GitLab is the only DevSecOps platform built on an open-core business model. The company enables any customer and contributor to add functionality to its platform.
The company’s transparent business value also helps us grow the open source community. The company makes its strategy, direction, and product roadmap available to the wider community to encourage and solicit their feedback. Through responsible transparency, the company creates a deeper level of trust with its customers and makes it easier to solicit contributions and collaboration from the company’s users and customers.
GitLab offers a flexible deployment model for the company’s customers. For the company’s self-managed offering, the customer installs GitLab in their own on-premises or hybrid cloud environment. For the company’s SaaS offering, the platform is managed by GitLab and hosted either in its public cloud or in the company’s private cloud based on the customer’s preference. The company also offers GitLab Dedicated, its single tenant SaaS solution, ideally suited for organizations with complex security and compliance requirements.
GitLab and the Evolution of DevSecOps
DevOps is the set of practices that combines software development (dev) and IT operations (ops). It allows teams to collaborate and work together to shorten the development lifecycle and evolve software delivery from a slow, periodic basis to rapid, continuous updates.
The DevSecOps platform – pioneered by GitLab – replaces a ‘Do it yourself (or DIY)’ DevOps approach where organizations stitch together complex toolchains. GitLab enables teams to realize the full potential of DevSecOps so that they can fully become a software-led business. It spans all stages of the DevSecOps lifecycle, from project planning (Plan), to source code management (Create), to continuous integration (Verify), to application security testing (Secure), to packaging artifacts (Package), to continuous delivery and deployment (Release) to configuring infrastructure for optimal deployment (Configure), to monitoring it for incidents (Monitor), to protecting the production deployment (Protect), and managing the whole cycle with value stream analytics (Manage). It also allows customers to manage and secure their applications across any cloud through a single platform.
The majority of the company’s customers begin their GitLab journey by using its Source Code Management (SCM), Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) solutions, referred to as Create and Verify. Developers use these solutions to collaborate on the same code base without conflicting or accidentally overwriting each other's changes. Create also maintains a running history of software contributions from each developer to allow for version control.
GitLab’s innovation strategy is another area of differentiation. The company has a dual flywheel innovation strategy that leverages both development efforts from its research and development team members, as well as community contributions via the company’s open-core business model. By leveraging the power of each, the company creates a virtuous cycle where more contributions lead to more features, leading to more users and more contributions.
The company emphasizes iteration to drive rapid innovation in its development strategy. This iterative approach has enabled the company to release a new version of its software every month for 160 months in a row as of January 31, 2025. This is also due in part to over 4,800 contributors in the company’s global open-source community as of January 31, 2025. GitLab team members also use The DevSecOps platform to power the company’s own DevSecOps lifecycle. By doing so, the company benefits from the inherent advantages of using a single application. The company leverages these learnings to establish a feedback loop to continually and rapidly improve its platform.
GitLab’s DevSecOps platform is used globally by teams of all sizes across a broad range of industries. To reach, engage, and help drive success broadly, the company has strong partnerships with cloud hyperscalers, including Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, or AWS, who offer GitLab on their marketplaces. In the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2025, the company announced a promising partnership with AWS to bring together a new, jointly developed artificial intelligence, or AI, solution named GitLab Duo with Amazon Q. This solution combines the power of AWS’ agentic AI capabilities with GitLab’s comprehensive DevSecOps platform. The company also benefits from strategic alliance partnerships which resell GitLab to large enterprise customers, and its strong channel partnerships ranging from large global systems integrators to regional digital transformation specialists and volume resellers. The company has a multi-faceted land-and-expand bottom-up and top-down sales strategy.
The DevSecOps Platform
GitLab’s DevSecOps platform brings together development, operations, IT, security, and business teams to deliver better, more secure software faster. It represents a step change in how teams plan, develop, secure and deploy software.
GitLab is built on a single codebase, unified data model, and user interface. GitLab offers customers flexible deployment options, including a self-managed offering, as well as multi-tenant and single tenant (GitLab Dedicated) SaaS solutions.
GitLab is designed to enable its customers to move their software development and delivery workflows across any hybrid or multi-cloud environment while maintaining full feature parity and a single application experience.
GitLab’s platform is purpose-built to address the entire software development lifecycle, with AI offered at every stage:
Manage: GitLab enables all stakeholders – from executives to practitioners – to get visibility and insights into their value stream delivery to measure the flow of work, from idea to customer value. With capabilities, such as Value Streams Dashboard and Value Stream Analytics, GitLab is uniquely positioned to be the tool of choice for data-driven organizations – enabling teams to understand software delivery performance and value to the business without complex configurations or data scientists. GitLab helps teams organize multiple projects into a single collaborative portfolio and track important events across the DevSecOps lifecycle. It also allows organizations to measure using key performance indicators - like adoption and performance metrics - as well as audit activity and permissions to ensure compliance while simplifying and optimizing the flow of work through the full DevSecOps value stream.
Plan: To create software, teams require collaborative planning from disparate groups, each with shared and unique objectives. GitLab enables this collaboration with portfolio planning and management through epics, groups (programs), and milestones that organize and track progress. GitLab helps teams organize, plan, align, and track project work to ensure teams are working on the right things at the right time and maintain end-to-end visibility and traceability of issues throughout the delivery lifecycle from idea to production.
Create: GitLab helps teams design, develop, and securely manage code and project data from a single distributed version control system to enable rapid iteration and delivery of business value. GitLab repositories provide a scalable single source of truth for collaborating on projects and code, enabling teams to be productive without disrupting their workflows.
Verify: GitLab helps software engineering teams fully embrace Continuous Integration, or CI, to automate the builds, integration, and verification of their code. GitLab’s secure CI capabilities enable automated accessibility, usability, performance testing, and code quality analysis to provide fast feedback to developers and testers about the quality of their code. With pipelines that enable concurrent testing and parallel execution, teams quickly get insight about every commit, allowing them to deliver higher quality code faster.
Package: GitLab enables teams to package their applications and dependencies, manage containers, and build artifacts with ease. The private, secure, container, and package registries are built-in and preconfigured out-of-the-box to work seamlessly with GitLab Source Code Management, or SCM, security scanners, and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, or CI/CD, pipelines.
Secure: GitLab’s offering is differentiated with built in, end-to-end security capabilities. GitLab provides Advanced Static Application Security Testing, or SAST, Dynamic Application Security Testing, or DAST, Fuzz Testing, Container Scanning, and Dependency Scanning to help customers deliver secure applications along with license compliance.
Release: GitLab helps automate the release and delivery of applications, shortening the delivery lifecycle, streamlining manual processes, and accelerating team velocity. With zero-touch CD built right into the pipeline, deployments can be automated to multiple environments like staging and production, and the system executes without additional manual intervention - even for more advanced patterns like canary deployments. With feature flags, built-in auditing/traceability, on-demand environments, and GitLab Pages for static content delivery, users can deliver faster and more confidently than ever before.
Configure: GitLab helps software development and delivery teams to configure and manage their application environments. Strong integration to Kubernetes reduces the effort needed to define and configure the infrastructure required to support an application. GitLab helps protect access to key infrastructure configuration details such as passwords and login information by using ‘secret variables’ to limit access to only authorized users and processes.
Monitor: GitLab provides feedback in the form of errors, traces, metrics, logs, and alerts to help reduce the severity and frequency of incidents so that users can release software frequently with confidence.
Govern: GitLab extends an organization’s existing operations practices to help teams manage their security vulnerabilities, project dependencies, and compliance policies to reduce overall risk. This enables teams to identify risks by providing them with a high degree of visibility into their projects' dependencies, security findings, and user activities. This visibility is then coupled with management tools to respond to those risks. Lastly, policies can be used to automate compliance and to help secure the software supply chain.
Growth Strategy
The company’s growth strategies are to advance its feature maturity across more stages of the DevSecOps lifecycle; drive growth through enhanced sales and marketing; drive increased expansion within its existing customer base; further grow adoption of its SaaS offering; grow and invest in its partner network; and expand its global footprint.
The DevSecOps Platform and Plans
The company offers GitLab in three different subscription tiers: Free, Premium and Ultimate.
The company’s Free tier caters to capabilities needed by individual contributors.
The company’s Premium tier is intended specifically for managers and directors to help teams enhance collaboration between development and operations teams, manage projects and portfolios, and accelerate the deployment of code.
The company’s Ultimate tier enables organization-wide change by facilitating better collaboration between development, operations, and security teams, instilling organizational-wide security, compliance, and planning practices, and implementing full value stream measurement, analytics, and reporting, across the DevSecOps lifecycle.
The company’s subscription plans are available as a self-managed offering that customers download to run in their own on-premises environment or hybrid cloud environments, and a SaaS offering, which is offered as either multi-tenant or single-tenant (called GitLab Dedicated).
Customers
The company serves organizations of all sizes across industries and regions. As of January 31, 2025, the company had customers in over 152 countries. For the year ended January 31, 2025, more than 70% of the company’s ARR came from public sector and enterprise customers. The company has key reference customers across a breadth of industry verticals that validate The DevSecOps platform, and its customers range from small and medium-sized teams to Fortune 500 companies.
Sales and Marketing
The company’s go-to-market strategy spans a dedicated enterprise sales motion, a self-service buying experience, ecosystem partners, professional services, and a customer success organization. The company organizes its sales organization by region and size, with an additional vertical focus on regulated industries, such as the public sector, financial services, and telecommunications. The company’s sales organization’s success is centered around its customers’ success, ensuring they achieve platform value through GitLab.
The company’s customer success organization manages its relationships with customers, both pre-sale and post-sale. Customer success helps customers achieve platform value and productivity with GitLab by building awareness, adoption, usage, and performance around modern DevSecOps capabilities. The company’s professional services organization is also focused on helping customers accelerate adoption with GitLab through implementation, migration, advisory, acceleration, and education services.
Through the company’s commitment to open collaboration, it also has select hyperscale and channel partners who increase efficient access to new and existing customers, and support the existing customer growth through trusted relationships, existing contracts, service delivery capability and capacity, and collaboration on large digital transformations. These partners include systems integrators, cloud platform partners, independent software vendors, managed service providers, resellers, distributors, and ecosystem partners. The company’s partnership program rewards partners who commit to and invest in a deeper GitLab relationship and lean into services for implementation and expansion success.
The company’s marketing department is focused on accelerating the buyer journey, from awareness, consideration, and conversion to expansion and advocacy. The company focuses on reaching both the executive buyer audience and the individual developer audience among potential and existing customers. The company utilizes diverse strategies, such as digital demand generation, account-based marketing, nurture programs, sales development, virtual and field events, sponsored webinars, gated content downloads, whitepapers, display advertising and integrated campaigns to connect with prospective customers. The company also hosts and present at regional, national and global industry events.
The company offers its free tier and/or a free trial to prospective customers. The company then engages with these users to encourage them to upgrade to a paid version. Once a customer is onboarded with GitLab, its teams work to identify additional business units and parent/child/subsidiary prospects that would benefit from The DevSecOps platform. Finally, as engaged members of the open-source community, the company’s contributors often serve as subject matter experts at market-leading developer events, and The DevSecOps platform is presented on the cutting edge of innovation.
Competition
In terms of DevSecOps platforms, the company’s principal competitor is Microsoft Corporation, which owns GitHub. The company also competes with well-established providers, such as Atlassian.
Intellectual Property
As of January 31, 2025, the company had twelve issued patents and nineteen pending patent applications in the United States and abroad. These patents and patent applications seek to protect proprietary inventions relevant to the company’s business. The issued patents are scheduled to expire between 2034 and 2042.
As of January 31, 2025, the company had 24 trademark registrations and applications in the United States, including for ‘GITLAB’ and its logo. The company also had 52 trademark registrations and applications in certain other jurisdictions and regions. Additionally, the company is the registered holder of a number of domain names, including gitlab.com.
Research and Development
The company’s research and development expenses were $239.7 million for the year ended January 31, 2025.
History
The company was founded in 2011. It was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 2014. The company was formerly known as GitLab B.V. and changed its name to GitLab Inc. in 2015.
