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title: Benefits of a single applications
description: Learn how simplifying your toolchain using a single application can increase your speed while reducing cost and risk.
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---

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    %h1 Why a single application for DevOps?
    %p Learn how simplifying your toolchain using a single application can increase your speed while reducing cost and risk.
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      ### The DevOps toolchain tax

      Traditional DevOps solutions require cobbling together multiple tools that were never designed to work together in order to build an DevOps toolchain.

      ![DevOps toolchain complexity](/images/single-application/devops-toolchain-complexity.png)

      This leads to having to pay a “tax” on your toolchain made up hidden costs.

        - Time and cost to acquire point tools
        - Time and cost to integrate all of these tools
        - Time and cost to train users on many tools
        - User context switching between all of these tools
        - Time and cost to administer all of these tools

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      ### Single application architecture

      GitLab is a complete DevOps platform designed from the ground up as a single application. From project planning and source code management, to CI/CD, security, and monitoring GitLab’s capabilities are built-in as part of the app so you don’t have to integrate multiple tools.

      ![single DevOps application](/images/single-application/single-application-all-devops.png)

      ### Benefits of a single application

      #### Reduce risk with a single set of permissions

      Rather than having to manage authentication and authorization across many tools. GitLab has a single login and one place to set permissions so everyone has the correct access.

      #### Reduce costs with Less administrative overhead

      With a single application to install, configure, and maintain there’s less administrative overhead. Since fewer staff needed to administer a single application verse a complex toolchain more of your engineering resources can be allocated towards development of features for your users.

      #### Increase speed with a lower time to resolution

      When a build pipeline fails how do you troubleshoot? Is it a problem with the infrastructure or did new code fail a test? Perhaps there state in the original specification that needed to help debug. With traditional toolchains the issue tracker, code repository, and CI/CD pipeline are all separate tools. When teams need to troubleshoot they have to pass state back and forth in a ticket because they likely don’t all have access to the same applications.

      With GitLab, everyone who needs to help troubleshoot a failure has access to all of the data. Pipeline, code, comments, issues, and test results all appear on the merge request so there’s a single view. With everyone on the same page troubleshooting is much simpler and things get up and running faster.

      [See more benefits of a single application](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/single-application/)

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      ## Get started with GitLab

      You can [get started with GitLab today](/get-started/). Our team would love to answer your questions on how you can benefit from a single application.

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