I am curious to what the difference between gitlab CE, EE and premium vs ultimate. If we are using EE without a license being specified in admin->license then we are using essentially the CE version?
I inherited a self managed gitlab server for my job. I am just trying to verify all of this so we can move forward correctly.
Thanks
If you enable the telemetry in Gitlab-EE you can get certain access to EE functionality for free. You cannot do that with Gitlab-CE. You can enable telemetry, service ping, etc, but CE won’t give anything extra in terms of EE functionality once enabled.
Premium and Ultimate are paid subscriptions for additional functionality that free EE doesn’t have. I’m not going to list what functionality, since that’s pretty clear in the Gitlab documentation, and it’s simply not possible to list all of it.
Is gitlab CE and gitlab ee free the same functionality?
Yes and no. As I already said, if you enable the service ping and other stuff that sends some info to Gitlab, then you get some EE functionality for free without having to pay for it. If you do not enable those options then yes, it’s pretty much the same as CE. The only difference is that you can easily add a license if you decide you want to use Ultimate or Premium. If you had CE, you would have to upgrade to EE first, and then you could add the license.
See here for the free EE features: Usage statistics | GitLab Docs