What GitLab features are not open source

GitLab is often presented as the open-source alternative to GitHub. In reality, only the Community Edition (CE) is open source under the MIT license. Most of the features GitLab actually advertises and sells live in the proprietary Enterprise Edition (EE), which is released under a non-free source-available license. If you self-host the free CE, you do not get them.

A non-exhaustive list of EE-only (proprietary) features:

• Advanced search (Elasticsearch-powered code search across projects)
• Multiple merge request approval rules and required approvers
• SAST, DAST, container scanning and secret detection
• Dependency scanning and license compliance
• Compliance frameworks and compliance dashboards
• Full audit events and audit reports
• Epics and multi-level epics
• Roadmaps and milestone planning views
• Portfolio and value stream analytics
• Protected environments and deployment approvals
• Geo replication across multiple regions
• Disaster recovery
• Group-level SAML SSO and SCIM provisioning
• LDAP group sync and Kerberos integration
• Push rules and required pipeline configurations
• Insights, value stream dashboards and DORA metrics

Gitly takes a different approach: every feature is part of the same open-source codebase. There is no Enterprise Edition, no paywalled module, and no separate "premium" repository.