Git Hosting
2 open source tools compared. Sorted by stars. Scroll down for our analysis.
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
| Tool | Stars | Velocity | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
 Gitea Self-hosted Git service | 59.0k | +127/wk | 91 |
 Forgejo Beyond coding. We forge. Self-hosted lightweight software forge. | 0 | - | 35 |
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Our Analysis
Gitea is the lightest full Git forge you can run yourself. One Go binary gives you repos, pull requests, code review, wikis, a package registry, and Gitea Actions, CI that reads GitHub Actions YAML. The open source build is MIT licensed with unlimited users. Setup is a binary or Docker image plus a database: SQLite for a small team, Postgres for anything bigger. The docs say 1GB of RAM is typically enough for small teams, so a $6 a month droplet works. Version 28.0 dropped the old "1." prefix and added audit logging, off by default, to the free build. Paying gets you SAML SSO, dependency scanning and autoscaling runners. Enterprise is $19 per user per month at list, or $9.50 on a one year commitment. Gitea Cloud, single-tenant managed hosting, lists the same $19, currently shown at $9.50. Solo and small teams: free. Larger teams needing SAML: compare GitHub Enterprise at $21. The catch is patching. CISA put a Gitea remote code execution bug on its actively exploited list in August, and 28.0 fixed five critical advisories, including a self-hosted runner takeover from a fork pull request. Upgrade within days. Forgejo is the community fork.
Forgejo is a self-hosted Git platform forked from Gitea in 2022 after a governance dispute over the parent project moving to a private company. The fork is run by Codeberg eV, a nonprofit, with a community-controlled governance model. GPLv3 from version 9.0 forward, MIT before that. Feature-wise, it is what Gitea is: repos, issues, pull requests, wiki, releases, package registry (Docker, npm, Maven, container registry, more), and Forgejo Actions, which is a fork of Gitea Actions and accepts GitHub Actions workflow files directly. Single Go binary or Docker container. Runs comfortably on a Raspberry Pi and scales to teams of thousands. Solo developers and small teams: install via Docker Compose, point your DNS at it, done. Larger teams: Forgejo is the safer long-term pick over Gitea because of the governance model. If you are starting fresh in 2026, choose Forgejo first. The catch is mindshare. Gitea has more users, more community plugins, and is what most tutorials reference. Migrating between Gitea and Forgejo is straightforward (database-compatible up through specific versions), so this is not a one-way door. Also worth noting: the source lives on Codeberg, not GitHub. Star counts and issue activity look quiet on GitHub mirrors because the real project is elsewhere.