GitHub vs GitLab for a startup: repos, CI, price and self-hosting.

GitHub Enterprise pricing is $21 a user a month on the pricing page. GitHub's plan docs describe one Enterprise plan with two deployment options, Enterprise Cloud and Enterprise Server. The pricing page lists no minimum seat count; check your order form before you sign.

GitLab pricing on 2 Nov 2026 shows Premium at $29 a user a month billed annually, with no monthly rate, and Ultimate as "Get custom pricing". Older blog posts quote a list price for Ultimate; GitLab's own page no longer shows one, so treat any figure you read elsewhere as a starting point for a quote.

Startup programmes. GitHub for Startups gives $10,000 of GitHub credits for up to 12 months, usable on Enterprise Cloud, Copilot and security add-ons. You need outside funding up to Series B and a link to a partner investor or accelerator, and you must be new to GitHub Enterprise. GitLab for Startups gives seed-stage companies (up to $5M raised) a free Ultimate licence for a year, SaaS or self-managed, for up to 20 seats, then 50% off in year two. Series A and B companies (up to $20M) get 50% off any tier in year one and 25% in year two, up to 20 users. Both are for new customers only, and self-funded startups don't qualify for GitLab's.

The default runners are a fair match: GitHub's standard Linux runner and GitLab's saas-linux-small-amd64 both have 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of memory. Bigger runners burn minutes faster on both. On GitLab a 4 vCPU medium runner has a cost factor of 2 and an 8 vCPU large runner a factor of 3; the large and bigger x86 sizes need Premium or Ultimate. Note the storage column measures different things: GitHub's is Actions artifact storage, GitLab's is the per-project limit on repository and LFS data.

Two counting rules differ. GitHub rounds every job up to a whole minute, so many short jobs cost more than their run time. GitLab counts job seconds divided by 60, times the cost factor, and doesn't charge for time a job spends waiting. GitLab also charges minutes to the top-level group, not the person who pushed.

Both platforms let you bring your own runners. GitHub's billing docs list self-hosted runners as free and outside the included compute; the $0.002 a minute self-hosted charge announced for March 2026 is still postponed, as our GitHub Actions pricing guide explains, along with per-minute rates for every runner size and when AWS runners pay off. GitLab suggests your own project or group runners as a way to cut compute-minute use.

Which is better? For a small team, neither CI engine is the deciding factor. Actions is quicker to start with because almost every tool has a ready-made action. GitLab CI is easier to reason about once a pipeline grows, because the whole flow sits in one file with explicit stages. The tier rules matter more: a deploy approval on a private repo costs $21 a seat on GitHub (Enterprise) and $29 a seat on GitLab (Premium). On GitHub Team, the usual workaround is a protected main with required reviews, and deploys that only run from main.

For a seed-stage team, the free layer is usually enough to start: Dependabot on GitHub, or GitLab's free SAST and secret detection templates, plus OIDC so there are no cloud keys to leak. Buy GitHub Secret Protection before Code Security if you buy one; leaked credentials are the more common incident. On GitLab, Ultimate is a large jump for scanning alone, and a free scanner in the pipeline covers a lot of the same ground.

The 180-day GitHub audit log is shorter than a 12-month SOC 2 observation window. Export it on a schedule, or pull it through the audit log API on Enterprise Cloud, so the evidence still exists when the auditor asks. Our SOC 2 on AWS page covers the AWS side of the same controls.

Data residency for UK and EU teams. GitHub.com and GitLab.com don't let you choose a region; GitLab's pricing FAQ says GitLab.com is hosted on Google Cloud in the USA. If a customer contract says code and CI logs must stay in the EU or the UK:

• GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency (GHE.com) offers an EU region, which GitHub says includes Azure regions in EFTA countries, currently Norway and Switzerland, plus Australia, US and Japan. There is no UK region. Some features and Copilot options are limited there, and public repositories aren't available.
• GitLab Dedicated runs on AWS in a region you pick, including Europe (London) eu-west-2, Frankfurt and Ireland. The region can't be changed after provisioning, and it comes with Ultimate features at an Ultimate price.
• Self-hosting either product in eu-west-2 meets any residency clause, at the cost of running it yourself (section 10).

If "UK only" is the requirement and the budget is a seed round, self-managed GitLab in eu-west-2 is often the only option that fits both. If "EU" is enough, GHE.com keeps you on GitHub.

What you take on when you self-host:

• Upgrades. GitLab releases a minor version on the third Thursday of every month and backports security fixes to the current release and the two before it. Fall three months behind and you are on an unpatched version of the system that holds all your code. GitHub Enterprise Server has shipped a feature release every two to three months recently, and GitHub supports at least the four most recent.
• The database. GitLab 19 needs PostgreSQL 17 at minimum. The bundled database is fine at this size; an external RDS instance adds reliability and cost.
• Backups you have restored. A Git server is a single point of failure for every deploy. Test a full restore to a fresh instance before you rely on it, the same rule as in our disaster recovery guide.
• No high availability. Both rows above are one instance. For HA, GitLab points to a modified version of its 3,000-user reference architecture, far beyond what a 15-person team needs, so plan for a few minutes of downtime per upgrade instead.
• Runners. CI runs on your own runners, which is cheaper per minute but is more infrastructure to patch. Keep them in a separate account or VPC, ephemeral, with OIDC roles only.
• GHES specifics. GitHub recommends a memory-optimised instance, and Actions on Enterprise Server needs external blob storage such as S3.

When self-hosting makes sense for a startup: a residency or air-gap requirement you can't meet otherwise, or a team large enough that GitLab Free self-managed saves real seat money. For 5 to 15 engineers without either, GitLab.com or GitHub.com is cheaper once you count the four hours. GitLab CE and EE both run the Free tier; GitLab recommends installing EE so you can turn on a paid tier later without converting.

Four things fall out of the table:

• GitHub Enterprise can be cheaper than Team. Enterprise costs $17 more per seat but includes $282 more compute a month. At 5 seats it wins above about 17,000 Linux minutes a month; at 12 seats, above about 37,000. Past 16 seats the extra seat cost outruns the extra compute.
• GitLab's CI overage is the expensive line. $10 per 1,000 minutes against GitHub's $6. Own runners on AWS remove most of it, at the cost of running them; the Actions pricing guide works through that maths for GitHub, and the same logic applies to GitLab Runner.
• Security add-ons can cost more than the platform. Both GitHub add-ons on 12 committers come to $7,056 a year, more than the seats and CI combined. Start with Secret Protection alone ($2,736 a year at 12) or with free scanners.
• The startup programmes change year one. $10,000 of GitHub credits would cover the 12-person Enterprise bill ($3,024) for the whole 12 months the credits last, if you qualify. GitLab's seed offer makes Ultimate free for up to 20 seats for a year.

Next to a seed-stage AWS bill (see how much AWS costs a startup), any of these totals is a small line. Pick on fit, then tune minutes.