GitHub vs GitLab: What a 20-Person Team Pays Once Security Scanning Is On

GitHub is the better buy for most software teams under about 50 engineers, and on seat price alone it isn’t close: $4 a user against $29. GitLab is the better buy for a team that has to show an auditor dependency scanning results and wants them produced by the same tool that runs CI.

Every comparison ranking for this keyword says roughly that, and then stops. The three we read before writing this page all quote GitHub’s security add-on as a flat per-user number. It isn’t. Since April 1, 2025, GitHub has sold two separate security products billed per active committer, which is a different headcount from your seat count, and that difference is where the real price of GitHub lives.

Prices come from github.com/pricing, about.gitlab.com/pricing and GitHub’s billing docs as of October 27, 2026.

Pricing in October 2026

One oddity worth a screenshot. GitHub’s pricing page now prints “first 12 months” next to the $4 and $21, with an asterisk and no visible footnote explaining what happens in month 13. If you sign an annual contract, get the renewal price in writing.

Seats vs Active Committers

GitHub charges seats for everyone in the organization. The security products are counted differently. Per GitHub’s billing docs, a committer is active if one of their commits was pushed within the last 90 days to a repository with the product turned on, and each person uses one license no matter how many repositories they push to.

Two consequences fall out of that, and neither shows up on a pricing page. Your designers need a $4 seat and no security license, and so does the engineering director who reviews every pull request but hasn’t pushed a commit in a year. And a contractor who pushes a single fix in mid-August keeps costing you $49 a month until mid-November, because the 90-day window runs from the push.

GitLab has no such split. Everyone is a $29 seat.

A 20-Person Team, Priced Four Ways

Take an engineering org of 20 people. Fifteen push code to private repositories in a typical quarter. The other five are a PM, two designers, an engineering manager and a QA lead who files issues and reviews PRs. All figures are monthly list prices.

The “GitHub is seven times cheaper” story only holds if you skip scanning. Turn on both GitHub security products and the same team pays more on GitHub Team than on GitLab Premium, and a team that also needs SAML SSO pays roughly twice as much on GitHub Enterprise.

The comparison isn’t quite apples to apples, though, and this is the part that should decide it for most buyers. GitLab Premium runs secret detection and basic SAST in pipelines. Seeing those findings in a merge request is an Ultimate feature, and so are dependency scanning, DAST and the security dashboards. Ultimate has no published price. If dependency scanning is the thing your SOC 2 auditor asked about, your real comparison is GitHub Team plus Code Security against an Ultimate quote.

GitHub has one lever GitLab doesn’t. Because the security products are counted per repository with the feature enabled, you can turn Code Security on for the three services that touch customer data and leave the marketing site and internal scripts off. If only eight of the fifteen engineers push to those three repos in a quarter, Code Security costs $240 a month instead of $450.

Scope it before you buy it.

CI/CD and Where the Minutes Run Out

GitLab’s paid tier includes more than three times the CI minutes of GitHub’s: 10,000 on Premium against 3,000 on Team. A team running a 12-minute test suite on every push to an active monorepo can burn through 3,000 minutes before the second week is out, and that is the most common reason a small team on GitHub Team ends up paying for extra Actions minutes or running its own runners. Both products let you register self-hosted runners, which don’t draw down the included minutes on either side.

If you deploy to Vercel or Netlify, much of the build work moves off your CI bill entirely. Our Vercel vs Netlify vs Cloudflare Pages comparison covers how those build minutes are priced.

Issues and Planning

GitLab ships issues, epics and boards inside the same product as the code, so a team that wants one tool and one bill can skip a separate tracker. GitHub Issues and Projects are good enough for many engineering-only teams, but plenty of companies pair GitHub with Linear or Jira once product and support start filing tickets. We compared that exact pairing in Linear vs Jira vs GitHub Issues.

AI Assistants

GitHub Copilot is sold separately, and the Copilot Business price was behind a sales form on the pricing page when we checked. GitLab now bundles usage credits for its Duo features into the paid tiers: $12 of GitLab Credits per user per month on Premium and $24 on Ultimate, with extra credits at $1 each.

GitHub: Strengths and Weaknesses

GitLab: Strengths and Weaknesses

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Comparisons

• Linear vs Jira vs GitHub Issues: whether GitHub’s built-in tracker is enough
• Vanta vs Drata vs Secureframe: the compliance tools that will ask which scanner you run
• Sentry vs Rollbar vs Bugsnag: error tracking that hooks into either platform