Native GitLab planning tool
GitLab Issue Boards is GitLab's built-in kanban-style board, part of the same platform as your repos and CI/CD.
If you're all-in on GitLab (repos, CI, and planning in one product), the integration between issues and merge requests is smooth — closing keywords in an MR description move the issue automatically.
Same story as GitHub Issues — great if you're fully on GitLab, but doesn't help at all if your team plans in Jira and codes on GitHub, which is still a very common split.
This is really the whole reason Jitly exists — it's not trying to replace GitLab Issue Boards at what GitLab Issue Boards is good at. Jitly's job is narrower and more specific: jitly start ABC-123 creates your branch and moves the Jira ticket to In Progress in one shot, jitly done commits, pushes, and updates the status to whatever your team's workflow has, fetched live so it never gets out of sync with how your Jira is actually configured.
And it's not just a CLI anymore — the Jitly VS Code extension does the same job visually: a sidebar with your Jira tickets, one-click start, pause work with a WIP push, done with live status transitions, and a one-click standup generator. Same project config and policies as the CLI, so a team can mix both.
Mainly teams that run their entire stack — repos, CI, planning — inside GitLab. If that's not you, this comparison probably isn't that relevant to your day — GitLab Issue Boards and Jitly solve different problems most of the time.
pip install jitly) or a VS Code extension. They're rarely a straight either/or choice — most teams comparing them are really deciding what to combine with what they already use.