GitHub does have that popularity and mind-share going for it, so I can see why people might not care to leave and create a new account at GitLab. The primary concern is the license which could be identical at either platform so that&#x27;s a non-issue.<p>The primary difference is that GitLab (referring to CE, the &#x27;Community Edition&#x27;) is completely portable and self-hostable. That means if things change later or the platform host gets a legal challenge or takedown request, you are free to say &#x27;go pound sand&#x27; and take your data and platform elsewhere. You are not at the mercy of the platform provider.<p>For a classic example of a community effort where the rules were changed after a great many users altruistically gave of their time and effort see CDDB, also known as Gracenote[0]. And as I typed my original comment, this thread[1] was on the HN front page with some choice comments illustrating the difficulty of doing a 100% clean export of your data from GitHub.<p>Google has a great initiative, humorously called the &#x27;Data Liberation Front&#x27;[2] which makes sure users can easily export all their data in a useful format if they want to take it elsewhere. I used it when I closed my Google accounts and I can report it works perfectly. I see no comparable effort by GitHub. Users like me check for this early and it&#x27;s absence is always a red flag.<p>Hope that answers your question and if my assumption that you don&#x27;t want to use GitLab because of the friction of creating yet another online account is incorrect please clarify what your real reason is.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CDDB" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CDDB</a><p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11054011" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11054011</a><p>[2]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Google_Data_Liberation_Front" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Google_Data_Liberation_Front</a>