GitLab and GitHub pricing per user vs what self-hosted GitLab CE costs

A private group on GitLab.com Free goes read-only once it has more than five users. From there, everyone you add costs a seat. GitHub bills every organization member and every outside collaborator on a private repo, each counted once. For a 40-person team using 500 CI minutes each a month, GitLab Premium comes to $15,120 a year.

At five people or fewer, GitHub Team or GitLab.com Free costs about the same as GitLab CE on servers of your own, or less. The rest of this page is for the team past that point. If you're still picking a platform, our guide on choosing GitLab or GitHub for a small team compares the two feature by feature.

What a seat costs on each plan

These are list prices in US dollars before tax, read October 20, 2026 on GitHub's pricing page and GitLab's pricing page.

GitLab bills growth in two ways. Seats you buy partway through the term are prorated to its end. People you add beyond the seats you bought are different: without quarterly reconciliation, GitLab charges them as an annual true-up for the full term. Guests count too. On Premium a user with the Guest role takes a seat, though on Ultimate they don't. GitLab doesn't list a price for Ultimate, so it isn't in these tables.

The monthly bill at 15, 40 and 100 people

Seats aren't the whole bill. Both vendors meter CI by the minute past an allowance, and that allowance belongs to the whole account or top-level group, so it doesn't grow when you add people. To put minutes in the bill, we assumed 500 Linux CI minutes per person a month on each platform's default hosted runner. Swap in your own number from your usage page. Our test pipeline for the Express web framework (install, test, package) used 0.80 job minutes on a cold cache and about 0.3 after that, but a project with a longer test suite will probably use many times that per push.

Past the allowance, GitHub charges $0.006 a minute on its Linux 2-core runner, and Windows and macOS minutes cost more ($0.010 and $0.062), so price those builds on a line of their own. GitLab sells extra minutes at $10 per 1,000, as a one-time purchase that rolls over if you don't use it, and its default small runner counts each minute once.

On GitLab Premium and GitHub Enterprise, seats are nearly the whole bill. GitHub Team is the exception, because its 3,000 included minutes run out early.

What self-hosted GitLab CE costs instead

GitLab CE has no license fee and no user cap, so the seat column disappears. You pay for hardware instead: one server for GitLab, and at least one more for the runner that does your CI jobs.

The GitLab server

GitLab's installation requirements set 8 vCPU and 16 GB of memory as the baseline for a single-node install. Its smallest reference architecture uses that same single node for up to 1,000 users, counting people and automation together, and GitLab generally recommends a standalone setup without high availability, with backups, up to 2,000 users. Stack 32, with 8 vCPU and 32 GB, is the first GitLab VPS Hosting plan that meets that baseline, so one Stack 32 covers every row in the table.

A team of about 15 that wants to try CE for a sprint can start on Stack 16 with a Stack 8 runner beside it. Stack 16 has the 16 GB and half the cores (4 vCPU), which puts it below GitLab's stated baseline. That's fine for a short trial.

We ran GitLab CE 19.5 on a small test VM (not a DreamHost server) to see what it holds before your team arrives. Idle use isn't a team-size figure, so the plan pick still rests on GitLab's own sizing.

The memory-constrained row uses GitLab's low-memory settings, which are meant for very small teams.

The runner servers

GitLab's runner install page says to install GitLab Runner on a machine separate from the one that hosts GitLab. Our test run shows what sharing costs. With the runner on the same 2 vCPU machine, one reading caught a small Node.js job at 137% CPU while GitLab used 79%, more than the two cores could give at once.

GitLab doesn't publish a hardware size for that machine, so we matched the runner the bill's minutes were priced on. GitHub's default Linux runner for private repos has 2 CPUs and 8 GB. GitLab.com's default small runner has 2 vCPUs and 8 GB too. So one Stack 8, with the same 2 vCPU and 8 GB, running one job at a time stands in for one hosted runner.

How many you need depends on CI. We assumed a runner stays busy at most 8 hours a day on 22 workdays, which is 10,560 job minutes a month. That gives one Stack 8 at 15 people, two at 40 and five at 100, the fewest that could get through each row's minutes in the working day. At 40 and 100 people they'd be busy 95% of that time, so we'd expect jobs to wait at the busiest hours. Watch the queue for the first month and add a runner when the wait bothers people. A Stack 32 runner can take about four 2 vCPU jobs at once, a little under 8 GB each, for less per job than four Stack 8 servers.

At the regular monthly rates, every GitHub Enterprise and GitLab Premium row costs at least 3.8 times as much as the GitLab server and its runner servers together. GitHub Team with hosted minutes costs about 2.5 times as much at 40 people and 4 times as much at 100. At 15 people, GitHub Team and CE's two servers cost about the same.

If you stay and run your own runner

GitHub doesn't charge for Actions on self-hosted runners. GitLab.com measures compute minutes on its instance runners, and your own runners keep working after you reach your limit. Send your jobs to your own machine and the CI line drops to $0 on all three plans, while the seat lines in the table above stay as they are.

Those are the same runner servers CE would need, so they cost the same either way. That leaves seats against one GitLab server. Seats alone pass Stack 32's regular monthly price at 3 people on GitLab Premium or GitHub Enterprise, and at 15 on GitHub Team. So at 15 people, GitHub Team with your own runner costs about what CE costs, and each person after that adds $4 a month in seats.

What CE leaves out next to Premium

Part of what the seat price buys is features CE doesn't have. In GitLab's free tier, which is the feature set CE runs, merge request approvals are optional and don't block a merge. If an auditor needs every change held until a second person approves it, you'll need Premium. Our GitLab or GitHub comparison lists what else moves to Premium.

On GitLab VPS Hosting, DreamHost support is available 24/7 for the hardware, network and connectivity. You manage the OS, software and configuration. DreamHost's Help Center says server management and automated backups aren't included with a VPS, so the backup line in the table above is yours to run.

The hours you take on

GitLab ships a monthly release on the third Thursday and patch releases twice a month. By our count, a team that keeps current applies about three updates a month, with a backup before each one. On our test instance, with one project and a few pipelines, gitlab-backup create took 26 seconds. Yours will grow with your repositories. But the backup leaves out gitlab.rb and gitlab-secrets.json, and GitLab's backup docs say to back up both yourself. We didn't time an update, so price that part from your own test.

CE saves money only while your upkeep costs less than the gap between the vendor bill and the servers. At 40 people the servers take under a tenth of the Premium bill, which leaves more than 90% of $1,260 a month to pay for the hours. Against GitHub Team they take about 40% of $262 at 40 people and almost all of $87 at 15.

1. Count every seat

   List members, outside collaborators and, on GitLab Premium, Guests. That number times your seat price is the first line.

2. Read last month's CI minutes

   Take the total from your usage page and subtract your plan's allowance. Price what's left at your platform's rate.

3. Count the runner servers CE would need

   Divide your monthly CI minutes by 10,560 and round up. Add one Stack 32 for GitLab itself.

4. Price your upkeep

   Time one backup and one update on a test server, multiply by three updates a month, and multiply that by your hourly cost.

Which bill to pick

How we priced and measured this

DreamHost read GitHub's, GitLab's and DreamHost's pricing pages on October 20, 2026, and re-checked its own GitLab VPS Hosting page and Help Center on October 22. Tax, storage overages, AI credits, larger runners and GitHub's renewal price aren't in the totals. The runner count is our estimate from a working-hours ceiling. Server prices come from the GitLab VPS Hosting page on the monthly term.

The measurements come from the official GitLab CE 19.5.0 image, which DreamHost ran on October 20, 2026, on a 2 vCPU, 8 GB arm64 test VM with Ubuntu 24.04. That VM isn't a DreamHost server, and it's far smaller than Stack 32. Memory is the median of 12 readings taken after a 10-minute settle. The first sign-in page answered about 120 seconds after a cold start. The run doesn't show a real team's load, a large repository, update downtime or a runner on a second machine.

GitLab and GitHub pricing FAQs