GitLab CI is similar to Travis CI in how it works. The page lists three things about Travis CI:
1. Unfortunately it still doesn't have support for pipelines
2. only very simple builds are possible.
3. if something doesn't pass in CI you normally need to send up lots of little debugging commits to work out why it's behaving differently
GitLab CI has does the following to address this:
1. As mentioned GitLab earlier has triggers and we're working on per project pipeline views
2. Builds in GitLab can have many stages with parallelism per stage, since today you can pass build artifacts between stages and cache items https://about.gitlab.com/2016/03/29/gitlab-runner-1-1-releas...
3. You can test the runner locally with exec https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/issues/...
Please let me know what is missed and what people need that we need to add to GitLab CI