What are the Best Practices and Tools available for Migrating from GitLab Self-Hosted to Atlassian?

[Suhas]

Hi Community,

We are currently using a self-hosted GitLab instance for project management, repositories, CI/CD pipelines, and artifact storage. We’re planning to migrate all our data — including repositories, project milestones, CI/CD pipelines, artifacts, and associated metadata — to the Atlassian ecosystem.

I’d appreciate any insights on:

• Available tools or automated solutions to facilitate a complete migration

• Recommended approaches or workflows for handling such a move

• Best practices to ensure data integrity and minimal downtime

Has anyone gone through a similar transition? Any lessons learned or things to watch out for?

Thanks in advance!

[Brita Moorus · Accepted solution]

Hi, @Suhas! 👋

That sounds like a major (and exciting!) transition. Here are a few tips:

• Repositories: You can migrate Git repositories to Bitbucket using Git mirror or clone/push methods.

• CI/CD: GitLab’s pipelines don’t translate directly to Bitbucket Pipelines. I don't think there is a converter that would create an exact copy of your GitLab pipeline in Bitbucket. You should convert it manually, by fully understanding the possibilities and the descriptor on both sides.

• Artifacts: If you're storing artifacts in GitLab’s built-in registry, you may need to migrate those separately.

• Project Management (Issues, Milestones): For this part, Jira is your go-to. There is no tool that would allow you to export everything from Gitlab and import it to Jira, the closest you can get is to export your issues in Gitlab to a CSV file and then import that file to an existing project in Jira that has been configured to behave similar to what you currently have.

Start with a detailed inventory of what you want to migrate: repositories, issues, CI/CD, users, labels, milestones, etc. Break down the migration in phases (repos → issues → pipelines → artifacts). Document your process along the way to help with onboarding and audits later.

CI/CD will need manual tweaking and some metadata (issue relations, merge request comments) may not migrate perfectly without custom scripting. 

Hope this helps, and happy migrating! 🚀

[Pramodh M]

Hello Suhas,

There isn't a specific approach here to move towards Atlassian Products.

While there are many verndors that offer migration, it depends on whether you are looking at full fidelity migration or partial migration. 

Atlassian Product Suite covers all mentioned requirements with Jira, Confluence & Bitbucket.

Once you are clear with the list of metadata, it will become clear with what migration tool to choose.

Thanks,
Pramodh

[Suhas]

Hi Pramodh,

Thank you for your response.

We’re aiming for a full migration, which includes:

• Repositories with all branches and complete commit history
• Project-level milestones along with all associated data
• CI/CD pipelines (migrating them to either Jenkins or Bitbucket Pipelines)
• Artifacts and other related metadata

We’re particularly looking for guidance on pipeline migration. If we have a large number of pipelines, what’s the best way to migrate them efficiently? Is there a way to automate the pipeline migration process to reduce time and manual effort?

We’d appreciate any recommendations on the best practices, tools, or approaches for this type of migration.

Thanks again!