[20] GitLab Inc. was established in 2014 to continue the development of the open-source code-sharing platform launched in 2011 by Dmytriy (or Dmitriy) Zaporozhets.

[27][28] In April 2018, GitLab Inc. announced integration with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to simplify the process of spinning up a new cluster to deploy applications.

[32] On August 11, 2018, GitLab Inc. moved from Microsoft Azure to Google Cloud Platform, making the service inaccessible to users in several regions including: Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, due to sanctions imposed by Office of Foreign Assets Control of the United States.

[33] In order to overcome this limitation, the non-profit organization Framasoft began providing a Debian mirror to make GitLab CE available in those countries.

[42] On July 23, 2021, GitLab Inc. released its software Package Hunter, a Falco-based tool that detects malicious code,[43] under the open-source MIT Licence.

On August 4, 2022, GitLab announced its plans for changing its Data Retention Policy and for automatically deleting inactive repositories which have not been modified for a year.

[44] Shortly after, it was announced that dormant projects would not be deleted, and would instead remain accessible in an archived state, potentially using a slower type of storage.

[56] In March 2015, GitLab Inc. acquired competing Git hosting Service Gitorious, which had around 822,000 registered users at the time.

[63] On December 14, 2021, GitLab Inc. announced that it had acquired Opstrace, Inc., developers of an open source software monitoring and observability platform.