Hey folks, I've been digging into CI/CD options for our team and I keep circling back to GitHub Actions and GitLab CI. We're about 20 developers, split between frontend and backend, with a mix of monorepos and smaller service repos. We're coming from a messy collection of Jenkins scripts, so anything is an upgrade, but I want to make the right long-term call.
I've read the docs and some high-level comparisons, but I'm really missing concrete, "in-the-weeds" details for a team of our size. Things like:
* How does the learning curve compare for developers who aren't DevOps specialists?
* What's the real cost difference look like at our scale? We probably run 1500-2000 pipeline minutes per day currently.
* Which one handles complex, multi-repo workflows better? We often need to trigger builds across services when a shared library updates.
* I hear a lot about "runner management" being a big deal. Is self-hosting runners significantly easier or more robust on one platform over the other?
I'd be especially grateful to hear from teams of a similar size who made this choice. What were the unexpected headaches or benefits after a year of use? Did you hit any scaling walls around 20-25 devs?
We're leaning towards GitHub because our code is already there, but I'm worried we might be missing out on some integrated features GitLab offers. The idea of a single platform is tempting, but is the CI piece truly better, or just more bundled?