Two software names, both beaten down heading into earnings night. One delivered. One didn’t. That contrast is playing out in premarket trading this Wednesday morning, with CrowdStrike (Nasdaq: CRWD) holding steady while GitLab (Nasdaq: GTLB) is getting hit hard.
CrowdStrike: Relief Rally After a Rough Stretch
Shares of CrowdStrike are up 0.65% in premarket trading as of 8:00 AM ET, a measured but meaningful response after the company reported Q4 FY2026 earnings after the bell on March 3, 2026. Given that the stock had been down roughly 16.5% year-to-date heading into the print, investors weren’t looking for fireworks. They just needed CrowdStrike to show up. We were live-blogging the earnings and were generally impressed. CrowdStrike won’t be up dramatically today, but they also provided strong enough guidance to prevent a sell-off , which many richly-valued software stocks have been unable to accomplish recently.
Revenue came in at $1.305 billion, up 23% year over year, edging past the $1.297 billion consensus estimate. More importantly, the company posted its first-ever quarter of positive GAAP net income at $38.7 million. That’s a milestone investors have been waiting on for years.
The ARR story is what really matters here. Ending ARR hit $5.25 billion, up 24% year over year, with net new ARR of $330.7 million in Q4 alone, up 47% year over year. The Falcon Flex platform, CrowdStrike’s flexible consumption-based licensing model, is becoming a real growth engine, with Falcon Flex ending ARR of $1.69 billion, up over 120% year over year. Think of it as the subscription model that customers actually want to expand rather than cancel.
CEO George Kurtz set the tone on the earnings call:
“FY26 will go down in our history books as CrowdStrike’s best year yet. We achieved $5.25 billion in ending ARR – the fastest and only pure-play cybersecurity software company to achieve this milestone.”
That’s not spin. The numbers back it up. FY27 guidance of $5.867 to $5.928 billion in revenue landed largely in line with what the market expected, and for a stock that’s been under this much pressure, inline is a win. You can read our full pre-earnings breakdown here.
GitLab: Beats on the Quarter, Misses on What Matters
GitLab’s situation is more complicated and more painful. Shares are down 8.6% in premarket trading as of 8:00 AM ET, even though the company actually beat on both revenue and earnings for Q4.
Revenue came in at $260.4 million, beating the $252.2 million estimate by 3.25%. Non-GAAP EPS of $0.30 crushed the $0.23 estimate. On the surface, that looks like a solid quarter. But the market is looking forward, not backward, and what it sees ahead is a problem.
FY2027 revenue guidance of $1.099 to $1.118 billion implies growth of roughly 15% compared to FY2026’s growth of 25.81%. That’s a significant deceleration. Worse, Q1 FY2027 non-GAAP EPS guidance came in at just $0.20 to $0.21, well below the prior quarter’s $0.30 print. For a company that still has a long road to sustained profitability, a step backward on forward earnings guidance is exactly the wrong signal. The full-year adjusted EPS guidance was the most troubling aspect of earnings, coming in more than 20% below Wall Street expectations.
GitLab also disclosed that free cash flow declined year over year in Q4 to $41.8 million. That’s not catastrophic, but it adds to the concern when paired with weak forward guidance.
CEO Bill Staples pointed to the company’s AI ambitions as the long-term thesis:
“GitLab sits at the heart of how enterprises build and deliver software. The launch of the GitLab Duo Agent Platform brings intelligent orchestration to the full software lifecycle, with all of the context needed to unlock step-function gains across every task in software engineering.”
The vision is credible. But vision doesn’t offset a profitability guide that moves in the wrong direction when investors are concerned offerings from Anthropic and other rivals will begin compressing margins.
GitLab has been in freefall for months, with the stock down roughly 52.5% over the past year and nearly 29% year-to-date even before this morning’s drop. See our full pre-earnings coverage here.
Two Stocks, Two Very Different Stories
Both CrowdStrike and GitLab operate in adjacent software spaces, both had been beaten up heading into earnings, and both actually beat on the quarter. But the market is punishing GitLab and giving CrowdStrike a pass, and the reason is simple: guidance. CrowdStrike’s forward outlook confirmed the growth trajectory is intact. GitLab’s raised serious questions about when, and whether, the profitability story arrives on schedule. Watch whether GTLB finds support near current levels or if selling pressure accelerates as the regular session opens.
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