Having used both for about 9 years I would say that's not correct at all.
Github may have beaten Gitlab to the punch with Pages (whoopee) but CI is a far more important feature, and Gitlab CI existed for years before GA, and continued to be a far superior solution for a long time (and maybe it still is?).
Also, because Gitlab targeted enterprises they had a bunch of features that Github did not. Self hosting, Identity and role based access, weighted issues, project milestones and burndown charts, private issues, support for "innersourcing" of internal repositories. The list goes. Unlike Pages, which is useful but can be replaced by any other wiki, things like role based access to projects are really important. When I switched jobs a few years ago and had to use Github, it felt more like a hobbyist's web-based toy version, lacking a lot of "big-boy" features.
The one truly essential feature that separated them "for the 99%" was CI. Once Github introduced that, it shrunk Gitlab's lead.
But Gitlab are by no means playing catchup to to Github.
Wholly agree with you. I’ve been using both professionally for years in parallel and have seen the evolution.
Totally agree on CI being superior. The config syntax is a bit of a pain and is aching for some higher level abstraction. But it’s very powerful, e.g. easily supporting cross project dependencies and build status across project in one neat interface.
I also agree that GitLab was optimized for enterprise and that’s where the major feature disparity is. If you are using it only for small hobby projects you will feel that it’s nothing special. I’ve used a self hosted version at a fortune 100 and it was a huge boon to productivity there over GH EE.
Github may have beaten Gitlab to the punch with Pages (whoopee) but CI is a far more important feature, and Gitlab CI existed for years before GA, and continued to be a far superior solution for a long time (and maybe it still is?).
Also, because Gitlab targeted enterprises they had a bunch of features that Github did not. Self hosting, Identity and role based access, weighted issues, project milestones and burndown charts, private issues, support for "innersourcing" of internal repositories. The list goes. Unlike Pages, which is useful but can be replaced by any other wiki, things like role based access to projects are really important. When I switched jobs a few years ago and had to use Github, it felt more like a hobbyist's web-based toy version, lacking a lot of "big-boy" features.
The one truly essential feature that separated them "for the 99%" was CI. Once Github introduced that, it shrunk Gitlab's lead.
But Gitlab are by no means playing catchup to to Github.