Case Study: Fanatics achieves CI stability and accelerated innovation with GitLab

Fanatics' successful GitLab CI transition empowers innovation cycles and speed

Fanatics, a sports retailer operating more than 300 online and offline stores, was hampered by an unstable CI/CD pipeline that left their integration and cloud teams spending most of their time fixing patches and outages with legacy tooling like Circle CI. They sought a stable, supported CI solution and chose GitLab CI to stop firefighting and improve reliability.

Fanatics migrated to GitLab at the end of 2018, moving 800 projects in three months and onboarding about 300 users across roughly 60 teams. GitLab’s CI stability and support removed the need for patches, enabled job scheduling and group‑level variables, and boosted user happiness to 95%, letting the cloud team focus on innovation, faster releases, and continuous deployment.

Fanatics

Guilherme Goncalves

Cloud Tech Lead