GitLab Lifecycle: End Of Life And Support Status
Last updated on February 26, 2025
GitLab is a web-based open-source collaboration application designed to streamline the lifecycle of DevOps operations. It is free to use for non-commercial use but with limited features, and also as a paid version.
The tool is designed to see DevOps operation from beginning to end and offers support for continuous integration and development.
GitLab is offered in Community Edition (CE) and the Enterprise Edition (EE). EE receives support from GitLab Inc. (paid tiers only) and it is easier for them to upgrade to the the paid tier in the future. These are both options missing in the CE.
Support status guide
End of life (EOL) is the end of a product’s useful life. When a product reaches the end of its life cycle, the manufacturer no longer supports it. The following table explains the different phases of a product’s lifecycle. Testing status is when the product is initially released and EOL is when product support is no longer offered. The time between these two points is the support timeframe.
Testing
The software is not yet publicly available. It is in testing phase i.e., alpha, beta, release preview etc.
Active
The software is actively supported by the vendor.
Phasing Out
The software will soon reach its end of life. You need to look for upgrade or migration options. The software will automatically go into phasing out status 2 months before end of life.
End Of Life
The software is no longer supported by the vendor. You need to make sure your system and environment are safe.
Version
Released
Active Support
Security Support
GitLab follows the Semantic Versioning scheme, which means that its versions are numbered as “Major.Minor.Patch” (eg: 13.10.3). A minor update is released every month between the dates of the 18th and the 21st, but in September 2023, GitLab. Inc. announced that they will be shifting the rollouts to the third Thursday of the month. Even so, some minor discrepancies have been observed in the release dates.
That said, the Major, Minor, and Patch releases also follow a strict release cadence, which the following table describes:
| Version type | Description | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Major | For significant changes, or when any backward-incompatible changes are introduced to the public API. | Yearly. GitLab schedules major releases for May each year, by default. |
| Minor | For when new backward-compatible functionality is introduced to the public API, a minor feature is introduced, or when a set of smaller features is rolled out. | Monthly. |
| Patch | For backward-compatible bug fixes that fix incorrect behavior. | As needed. |
The Patch releases only include bug fixes. To read more about the Patch releases, refer to the GitLab Patch Update information page.
Each release of GitLab is supported for one month, until the release of the next Minor update. Therefore, at any given time, only one version of GitLab is actively supported. After that, the version only receives security support for another 2 months.
To learn the tentative release dates for the upcoming GitLab versions, you may refer to the Gitlab Upcoming Releases page.
EOLs