As mentioned in previous answers, both serve almost same purpose. Personally I like git rebase and merge request (as in gitlab). It takes burden off of the reviewer/maintainer, making sure that while adding merge request, the feature branch includes all of the latest commits done on main branch after feature branch is created. Here is a very useful article explaining rebase in detail: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Rebasing