GNU Savannah Alternatives for Free Software Projects

GNU Savannah is the Free Software Foundation's free hosting site for free software. It has two halves: savannah.gnu.org for official GNU packages and savannah.nongnu.org for everything else. Projects get CVS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar or GNU arch repositories, plus mailing lists, bug trackers, web pages and file downloads. It still works. Every project must be free software and declare its licence when it registers, and owners cannot delete a project once it is approved, per Wikipedia's Savannah entry.

Its servers have had a rough two years. In July 2026, as Slashdot reported, the FSF's sysadmins described blocking botnets with reaction, after scraper traffic that included a network of hijacked smart TVs hit Savannah. A month earlier, OpenSourceForU reported that the FSF had fixed a Savannah flaw that had sat in the code for about two years, found in May 2026 by an AI code-review tool. The FSF said it found no sign of tampering.

The seven hosts below are ordered by how close they stay to Savannah's values. The first four run on free software end to end. GitLab and GitHub come last because the GNU Project grades both F for requiring nonfree JavaScript.

Prices below are as of November 8, 2026. Our method is on How we review tools.

Quick comparison

Codeberg

Codeberg is run by Codeberg e.V., a Berlin non-profit, on hardware it owns. Like Savannah it exists for free software only: public projects need a licence that lets others reuse the work. Unlike Savannah it speaks Git alone, through Forgejo, with pull requests, issues, a wiki, Pages for static sites, Weblate for translations and Woodpecker CI on request.

There is no approval queue for a new repository, which is the first thing Savannah users notice. If your project grows past 750 MiB of Git data, you write to ask for more. Our Codeberg alternatives page covers the cases where its rules get in the way.

Best for: Free software projects that want a modern Git workflow without leaving the non-profit world.

Pricing:

• Free for free software projects; the association lives on donations and optional memberships
• Ask before passing 750 MiB of Git storage or 1.5 GiB of packages, LFS and attachments

Watch out for:

• Private content is limited to about 100 MB for contributors to free software, reviewed case by case, and closed commercial projects are told to self-host, per the Codeberg FAQ.
• The Register reported in August 2025 that AI crawlers slowed it badly, so it is not immune to the problem Savannah faces.

Official site: Codeberg.

SourceHut

Projects that review patches on a mailing list will feel at home here. SourceHut is built around email: lists.sr.ht holds the discussion, git.sr.ht and hg.sr.ht hold the code, and todo.sr.ht is the tracker. That covers most of what a Savannah project page bundles, and it keeps Mercurial, which most modern forges have dropped.

The pages are light and work without JavaScript. The whole platform is open source, so you can also run your own instance later.

Best for: Savannah projects that work through patches on mailing lists, or still use Mercurial.

Pricing:

• €4, €8 or €12 a month ($4, $8 or $12), billed monthly, excluding VAT
• Every tier gets the same services; financial aid on request
• Contributing to other people's projects is free

Watch out for:

• SourceHut is still a public alpha, and the pricing page says builds.sr.ht CI and chat already need a paid account, with the list open to change.

Official site: SourceHut.

Forgejo (self-hosted)

Forgejo is the software Codeberg runs, and you can host it yourself. It began as a fork of Gitea in October 2022 and became a hard fork in early 2024. Since v9.0 new code is licensed GPLv3 or later. A single binary or a container image gives you repositories, issues, pull requests, packages and Actions-style CI.

Self-hosting is the only route on this list where nobody else decides your limits. It also means you own the scraper problem that keeps Savannah's admins busy. If you prefer the MIT-licensed original, see our Gitea alternatives page.

Best for: GNU-style projects or groups that want their own forge on a server they control.

Pricing:

• Free software, no paid edition
• You pay only for the server

Watch out for:

• Stable Forgejo releases are short-lived: v17.0.1 (October 26, 2026) is supported only until January 28, 2027, so slow upgraders should run the v15 LTS line, supported until July 15, 2027.

Official site: Forgejo (self-hosted).

Launchpad

Canonical's Launchpad is the other old-school forge with a tracker for everything. It hosts Git code with reviews, a bug tracker, an answers tracker, specifications and crowdsourced translations. Hosting is free for free software projects.

Packaging is the other draw. A Personal Package Archive (PPA) builds Ubuntu packages from your source, and projects such as Inkscape and Beautiful Soup run their trackers there.

Best for: Projects that want a bug tracker, a translation team and Ubuntu packages in one place.

Pricing:

• Free for free software projects
• Commercial subscriptions are no longer offered; proprietary projects get a 30-day trial

Watch out for:

• Bazaar is on its way out. Launchpad set December 11, 2025 as the end of Bazaar code hosting, so bzr users on Savannah have one fewer escape route.

Official site: Launchpad.

SourceForge

Savannah itself started as a fork of SourceForge's code, and SourceForge is still running under Slashdot Media. It lists more than 500,000 projects and serves millions of downloads a day. For a project that never moved off Subversion, it is one of the few hosts left, with read-write access over svn+ssh and HTTPS and anonymous read-only checkouts.

The download mirrors are its real strength. If you publish tarballs and installers, it spreads them across mirrors and counts downloads.

Best for: Projects that still use Subversion or need a busy download mirror network.

Pricing:

• Free project hosting
• No storage quotas on Subversion, per the docs

Watch out for:

• The GNU Project grades it F because important functions fail without JavaScript, and its 2013 to 2015 history of bundling adware into installers still costs it trust, as Wikipedia's history records.

Official site: SourceForge.

GitLab

GitLab's community edition is open source, and you can self-manage it for free. On GitLab.com, the GitLab for Open Source program gives qualifying projects a free Ultimate licence and 50,000 compute minutes a month, and lifts the five-user cap. That is far more CI than Savannah, which has none.

Issues, merge requests, a wiki, a container registry and Pages all live in one project. Self-managing it is heavier: the requirements page asks for 8 vCPU and 16 GB of RAM on a single node.

Best for: Larger free software projects that need CI and are fine with a commercial host.

Pricing:

• Free: $0, 400 compute minutes a month, 10 GiB storage, 5 users per private group
• Premium: $29 per user a month, billed yearly
• Ultimate: contact sales; free for approved open source projects

Watch out for:

• The pricing page FAQ says shared runners on GitLab.com need a credit or debit card, checked with a $1 authorization, unless you bring your own runner.
• The GNU Project grades gitlab.com F because most basic actions, including filing a bug, need nonfree JavaScript.

Official site: GitLab.

GitHub

Most drive-by contributors already have a GitHub account. A read-only mirror there is a common compromise for projects whose real home is elsewhere. Public repositories get Actions minutes and package storage free on every plan.

It is the furthest from Savannah's values: a proprietary Microsoft service under US jurisdiction.

Best for: Projects that care most about reach and outside contributions.

Pricing:

• Free: $0, 2,000 Actions minutes a month and 500 MB packages for private repos; public repos free
• Team: from $4 per user a month
• Enterprise: from $21 per user a month

Watch out for:

• The GNU Project's repository criteria evaluation grades github.com F for nonfree JavaScript and for encouraging poor licensing practices, so official GNU packages are steered away from it.

Official site: GitHub.

How to choose

When to stay with GNU Savannah

Stay on Savannah if your package is part of GNU, or if the FSF's strict line on free software matters more to you than CI or pull requests. It still holds an A grade in the GNU Project's own evaluation, it keeps CVS, Bazaar and GNU arch alive when nobody else does, and it costs nothing. Many projects keep Savannah as the canonical repository and push a mirror to Codeberg or GitHub for visibility.

Frequently asked questions