GitLab is a software forge primarily developed by GitLab Inc. It is available as a community edition and a commercial edition.
GitLab was created in 2011 by Ukrainian programmer Dmytro Zaporozhets. It was a side project, written in Ruby on Rails. The company was formerly known as GitLab B.V. In July 2015, the name changed to GitLab Inc. In 2021, it became a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq Global Market, under the ticker symbol GTLB.
In 2024, co-founder and CEO Sybren Sijbrandij stepped down to focus on cancer treatment, with Bill Staples succeeding him as CEO while Sijbrandij remained as board chairman.
In December 2025, Sijbrandij co-founded Kilo Code, an AI coding startup, raising $8 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and others.
GitLab consists of several components, mostly interconnected by Unix sockets: