Gitea Alternatives for Self-Hosted and Hosted Git

Gitea has not gone anywhere. Version 28.3.0 came out on November 1, 2026, after the numbering jumped from 1.27 to 28.0 in September. The self-hosted edition is free and MIT licensed with unlimited users and repositories, and Gitea Ltd sells an Enterprise edition and a managed Gitea Cloud on the side.

That company is the reason many people look elsewhere. Forgejo's comparison page says Gitea's domains and trademark moved to a for-profit company in October 2022 without the community's approval, and Forgejo was created that month. It became a hard fork in early 2024. Others leave for different reasons: they want built-in CI, a lighter server, or no server at all. The seven options below cover each case, starting with the self-hosted forges.

Prices below are as of November 6, 2026. Our method is on How we review tools.

Quick comparison

Forgejo

Forgejo looks and works like the Gitea you already run, because until early 2024 it shared most of the same code. It lives under Codeberg e.V., a German non-profit, rather than a company. Since v9.0 in October 2024, new code is released under GNU GPL v3+, while the majority of the code is still MIT, per the v9.0 release post. The binary still answers to the name gitea so existing Git hooks keep working.

The catch is the upgrade path. A December 2024 notice says Gitea 1.22 is the last version that converts in place, and only up to Forgejo v10.0. Instances on Gitea 1.23 or later need a hand-edited database or Forgejo's built-in repository migration, one repo at a time. The current stable release is v17.0.1, with an LTS line, v15, supported until July 15, 2027.

Best for: Gitea admins who want the same features without a company owning the project.

Pricing:

• Free software, no paid edition
• Hosted for free on Codeberg for free software projects

Watch out for:

• Moving a current Gitea server is not a version bump. The compatibility notice offers only best-effort help for Gitea 1.23 and later.
• Stable releases are short-lived. v17 support ends January 28, 2027, per the releases page, so rare upgraders should stay on LTS.

Official site: Forgejo.

GitLab

Teams that outgrow Gitea Actions often end up on GitLab. Pipelines, a container and package registry, issue boards, merge request approvals and security scanning all live in one product, and the free tier can be installed on your own servers or used on GitLab.com.

Plan the hardware first. The requirements page sets 8 vCPU and 16 GB of RAM as the single-node baseline, with 8 GB as the floor in memory-constrained setups. A Gitea instance for the same team often runs on a fraction of that. On GitLab.com the free tier stops at 5 users per private top-level group.

Best for: Teams that want CI/CD, registry and planning from one vendor and have the server budget for it.

Pricing:

• Free: $0, self-managed or GitLab.com (5 users per private group, 400 compute minutes a month on GitLab.com)
• Premium: $29 per user per month, billed annually
• Ultimate: contact sales

Watch out for:

• Memory use is the common complaint. Even the reduced-memory floor of 8 GB in the requirements rules out the small VPS many Gitea users run.
• Free to Premium is a jump to $29 per user per month, billed annually, with no tier in between.

Official site: GitLab.

OneDev

OneDev is a Java-based forge that ships Git hosting, CI/CD, a package registry, a wiki, code search and an automated kanban board in one install. Its CI pipelines are built in a GUI editor, which the README sells as "CI/CD as code without writing code". The code is MIT licensed and the repository has about 15.3k stars.

The free Community edition already includes LDAP and Active Directory, SSO, 2FA and the CI engine. Enterprise adds high availability, cross-project code search, security scanning, Kubernetes workspaces, audit logs and time tracking, per the pricing page.

Best for: Small teams that want CI/CD built into the forge without running a separate runner fleet.

Pricing:

• Community: free
• Enterprise: $6 per user per month, minimum order of 12 user-months
• Disabled users, service accounts and AI users are not counted

Watch out for:

• Development happens on the project's own server. The README asks for issues and pull requests at code.onedev.io, not on GitHub.
• There is no hosted OneDev plan on the pricing page, so you run the server yourself.

Official site: OneDev.

Gogs

Gitea itself began as a fork of Gogs in November 2016, according to Wikipedia, and Gogs is still maintained. The releases page marks v0.14.3, from June 7, 2026, as the latest. The 0.14.1 notes list Go 1.25 as the build requirement. It is a single Go binary with repos, issues, pull requests, wikis and webhooks.

What it lacks is most of what Gitea added later. There is no built-in CI runner like Gitea Actions and no package registry. If you only need a private place to push code on a Raspberry Pi or a small VM, that small scope is the appeal.

Best for: Home labs and tiny teams that only need Git hosting, issues and pull requests.

Pricing:

• Free and open source, MIT licence
• No paid edition

Watch out for:

• Release cadence is slow and security-heavy. The 0.14.3 notes on the releases page list more than 20 security fixes, including user impersonation through reverse proxy headers, so patch promptly.
• The 0.14.0 release was pulled because SSH clones hung, and the page tells users to install 0.14.1 or later.

Official site: Gogs.

Codeberg

For a Gitea user who is tired of patching a server, Codeberg is the shortest move. It runs Forgejo, so the interface, issue tracker and pull requests look almost the same, and Woodpecker CI covers builds. The non-profit Codeberg e.V. runs it, mostly on its own hardware in Berlin, per the FAQ.

Signing up costs nothing and membership in the association is optional. More options are on our Codeberg alternatives page if Codeberg's rules do not fit.

Best for: Open source maintainers who want Forgejo without running it.

Pricing:

• Free; funded by donations and optional Codeberg e.V. membership
• Ask before passing 750 MiB of Git storage or 1.5 GiB of packages, LFS and attachments

Watch out for:

• It is not a home for company code. The FAQ caps private content at 100 MB per contributor and rules out private commercial hosting.

Official site: Codeberg.

GitHub

Gitea's Actions docs call it "similar and mostly compatible" to GitHub Actions, so many workflows move back to GitHub with few edits. That is the practical reason self-hosters return: the marketplace of actions, Dependabot and the contributor audience all come with it. Free organizations get 2,000 Actions minutes and 500 MB of Packages storage a month, per the pricing page.

Self-hosting is still possible. GitHub sells an on-premises edition, Enterprise Server, under its Enterprise plan, which runs $21 per user per month on the same page.

Best for: Teams that want to stop running a forge and reuse their Actions workflows.

Pricing:

• Free: $0, 2,000 Actions minutes a month
• Team: $4 per user per month, 3,000 minutes
• Enterprise: $21 per user per month, includes the self-hosted Enterprise Server option

Watch out for:

• The self-hosted route costs $21 per user per month, against free for Gitea, Forgejo or OneDev Community.
• Your code sits on a US provider's servers unless you pay for Enterprise Server, which is often the reason teams chose Gitea in the first place.

Official site: GitHub.

SourceHut

Pull requests are not how SourceHut works. Contributors send patches to a mailing list on lists.sr.ht, and maintainers apply them with git am. Git and Mercurial hosting, a ticket tracker and builds.sr.ht CI are separate small services that load quickly even on slow links.

The software is open source and can be self-hosted, though it is several services rather than one binary. Most people use the hosted version, where the pricing page offers three tiers with the same features. For hosts that also serve release downloads, see our SourceForge alternatives.

Best for: Developers who prefer email-driven review or still need Mercurial.

Pricing:

• €4, €8 or €12 per month ($4, $8 or $12), plus VAT, identical features
• Financial aid available; contributing to others' projects is free

Watch out for:

• The platform is still labelled public alpha, and the pricing page says builds.sr.ht and chat.sr.ht already need a paid account.

Official site: SourceHut.

How to choose

When to stay with Gitea

Stay on Gitea if it runs fine and the company behind it does not bother you. It is MIT licensed, ships releases every few weeks, and its 28.x line added security fixes as recently as October 2026. If you might want Forgejo later, know that your in-place upgrade window closed with Gitea 1.22. If you need SAML SSO or audit logs, Gitea Enterprise is listed at $9.5 per user per month on a one-year commitment, which may be cheaper than moving.

Frequently asked questions