The following page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.
GitLab competes in a large market space, with a CSM estimated at ~$18B in 2024. GitLab has recently surpassed the $150M ARR milestone, with unusually high revenue growth and retention rates. GitLab is uniquely positioned in the market with a vision to offer a single application for the entire DevSecOps lifecycle. GitLab competes across numerous market segments and aims to deliver value in 80+ market categories. GitLab’s product vision is uniquely ambitious, as we were the first DevSecOps player to take a single application approach. From idea to production, GitLab helps teams improve cycle time from weeks to minutes, reduce development process costs, and enable a faster time to market while increasing developer productivity. With software “eating the world,” this is widely viewed as a mission-critical value proposition for customers. We also have a number of tailwinds in the form of cloud adoption, Kubernetes adoption, and DevSecOps tool consolidation, which are helping fuel our rapid growth. Finally, GitLab has an open source community and distribution model, which has exposed the value of GitLab to millions of developers and has sped up the maturation of our product through more than 200 monthly improvements to the GitLab codebase from our users.
Every year at GitLab, we choose some specific areas of emphasis to help guide the teams on the areas of our product that we want to accentuate. This section is used to highlight that emphasis. It is not a comprehensive list of everything we plan to do this year. Direction for each stage and category can be found at the respective direction pages. We are not asking the teams to deviate from their core mission.
Many teams will see themselves contributing to these areas of emphasis directly. The other teams will continue to execute on their mission - that is also important.
The themes are to help facilitate cross-team collaboration when invariably teams working on the 1-year themes may need to collaborate with others. Our guidance is: if any team approaches you to prioritize something that is thematic for this year, consider that as a higher priority than you would normally - as it is in service of the broader product-wide goal that we, as a company, have deemed important to accomplish this year.
See Product Investment (internal handbook page) for how we allocate our R&D investment across our product hierarchy.
For FY26, the four key R&D investment themes we are focused on are:
We will focus primarily on core DevSecOps platform capabilities across SCM, CI, CD, security, compliance, and enterprise agile planning with the goal to achieve a leadership position or extend our existing leadership position. We will drive Premium and Ultimate value by helping propel free-to-paid conversion through product-led growth / feature discovery moments.
We will introduce new as well as improve existing GitLab Duo AI capabilities within our core DevSecOps platform capabilities. We will also bring ModelOps features to general availability, including a focus on enabling customers to work with native data science workloads within GitLab.
We will focus on deepening the types, and quality of metrics, as well as pulling metrics from third party integrations, with the goal of making GitLab the central component to understanding SDLC insights. We will also provide reporting of feature usage enabling customers to understand what features and capabilities are being used by their teams as well as what usage is connected to Premium and Ultimate tiers, or are features and capabilities included in add-ons.
We will focus on addressing use case adoption issues as well as improving user experience within onboarding to improve our customer's time-to-value for core DevSecOps platform capabilities. We will improve customer experience improve ease-of-use for SMB/commercial customers with license management and self-service workflows. Based upon and informed by the pricing research completed in FY25, we will also implement an updated pricing strategy.
For FY25, the four key R&D investment themes we are focused on are:
AI as part of software development has continued to mature and has become the number one topic in our customer discussions. To meet our customers’ needs and the evolving market landscape, we will take a three pronged approach to AI (GitLab Duo, ModelOps, AI agents) as part of our DevSecOps platform providing us differentiation in the market.
CI and CD are critical to the success of Premium, while security and governance drives value in Ultimate. We will increase our focus on adoption of these areas - ensuring that customers realize the value of the capabilities they have paid for. This will continue to reduce churn, drive free-to-paid conversion, and increase up-tiering from Premium to Ultimate.
Toolchain consolidation continues to come up with customers as well as in our annual DevSecOps survey. We will capitalize on our position as the enterprise DevSecOps platform by continuing to expand our planning capabilities, continuing to mature our metrics and reporting, and bring new SCM capabilities to general availability.
GitLab.com and GitLab Dedicated continue to grow in popularity as more organizations need to undergo digital transformations however do not want the overhead of self-hosting their DevSecOps platform. We expect this trend to continue in FY25 and will invest in our SaaS deployments to ensure they meet our customers’ expectations.
DevSecOps is a broad space with a lot of complexity. To manage this within GitLab, we break down the DevSecOps lifecycle into a few different sections, each with its own direction page you can review.
In addition to addressing the DevSecOps lifecycle internally through the above sections, contributions from the community also help increase our rate of innovation, which helps mature the stages of our DevSecOps platform. These community contributions are an important part our company mission and strategy.
Our issue tracker contains requests made for features and changes to GitLab. Contributing is the best way to get a feature you want included as we continually merge code to be released in the next version. Please see our Contribute to GitLab page for more details such as guides to get started contributing, areas looking for contributions, and contribution acceptance criteria.
Personas are the people we design for. Developers, security professionals, and operations professionals are currently the primary personas we focus on, and we tailor our user experience to their needs. We want GitLab to be the main interface for people in these roles, so they can show up at work, start their day, and load up GitLab. And that’s already happening.
But there are a lot of other roles involved with the development and delivery of software. That is the ultimate GitLab goal - where everyone involved with software development and delivery uses a single application so they are on the same page with the rest of their team. We are rapidly expanding our user experience for Designers, Compliance Managers, Product Managers, and Release Managers. We’ll also be expanding to the business side, with Executive visibility and reporting. While we’re still calling it DevSecOps, we’re really expanding the definition of DevSecOps and delivering it all as a single application.
GitLab is not immune to disruption. In some ways, it is a sign of success that GitLab is now at a scale where we have to think about low-end disruption. Arguably, a few years ago, GitLab was a low-end disruptor.
Clayton Christensen defines low-end-disruption as follows:
Low-end disruption refers to businesses that come in at the bottom of the market and serve customers in a way that is "good enough." These are generally the lower profit markets for the incumbent and thus, when these new businesses enter, the incumbents move further "upstream." In other words, they put their focus on where the greater profit margins are.
Our perspective is that low-end disruption is an additional and critical sensing mechanism. This is especially true for the DevSecOps market. We look at the following attributes to figure out if a low-end disruption has anything close to potential product-market resonance. This list is an adaptation of the Product Zeitgeist Fit.
A reason low-end disruptors are able to enter the market is that the feature-absorption by users is lower than the feature-velocity of the established vendor. To address this we are focused on a working-by-default configuration principle.
As we add new categories and stages to GitLab, some areas of the product will be deeper and more mature than others. We publish a list of the categories, what we think their maturity levels are, and our plans to improve on our categories page.
We strive to be the best product in the market and to be complete. As the market, customer needs, competitive landscape, and technology change, we should expect our maturities to also change, including changing to a lower maturity rating. By embracing a focus on improvement and low level of shame, we encourage moving a maturity down. This is a strong indicator that we are realists about our product with an eye on achieving the best results for our customers.
We try to prevent maintaining functionality that is language or platform specific, because they slow down our ability to get results. Examples of how we handle it instead are:
Outside our scope are Kubernetes and everything it depends on:
During a presentation of Kubernetes, Brendan Burns talks about the four Ops layers at the 2:00 mark:
GitLab helps you mainly with application ops. And where needed, we also allow you to monitor clusters and link them to application environments. But we intend to use vanilla Kubernetes, instead of something specific to GitLab.
Also outside our scope are products that are not specific to developing, securing, or operating applications and digital products.
In scope are things that are not mainly for SaaS applications:
We expect GitLab to continue to grow, and we have several ideas for possible future stages
To make sure our goals are clearly defined and aligned throughout the organization, we make use of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Our quarterly Objectives and Key Results are publicly viewable.
At GitLab, we strive to be ambitious, maintain a strong sense of urgency, and set aspirational targets with every release. The direction items we highlight in our kickoff are a reflection of this ambitious planning. When it comes to execution, we aim for velocity over predictability. This way, we optimize our planning time to focus on the top of the queue and deliver things fast. We schedule 100% of what we can accomplish based on past Development Department merge request rate and availability factors (vacation, contribute, etc.).
See our product handbook on how we prioritize.
On our releases page, you can find an overview of the most important features of recent releases and links to the blog posts for each release.
GitLab releases a new version every single month. You can find the major planned features for upcoming releases on our upcoming releases page or see the feature issues for paid tiers.
Note that we often move things around, do things that are not listed, and cancel things that are listed.
With Gitlab 15.4, Suggested Reviewers was released as our first customer-facing ML/AI technology in production features. We have additional ambitions in the near future for several types of problems. This is the focus of our new ModelOps stage.
GitLab consistently strives to deliver a cohesive experience that enables workflows that span the DevSecOps loop. We have a number of existing capabilities and planned improvements that do just that: