Gitea

Gitea is self-hosted GitHub that runs on a Raspberry Pi. At 200-300MB RAM idle, it provides issues, pull requests, CI/CD (via Gitea Actions), and a clean web UI — everything a small team needs without GitLab's 12GB+ RAM appetite. 54k stars and written in Go for a reason: it's fast and resource-efficient.

GitLab is the enterprise monolith with built-in CI/CD, security scanning, and DevSecOps — if you have the RAM and the team to manage it. Forgejo is a community fork of Gitea with GPLv3 and stronger governance guarantees (Gitea went Open Core). GitHub is the obvious cloud choice.

Use Gitea if you want self-hosted git with a modern UI and you don't need GitLab's enterprise features. Perfect for homelabs, small teams, and organizations with data sovereignty requirements.

The catch: Gitea Actions are GitHub Actions-compatible but less mature. The project went Open Core — some features are now proprietary. If the open-source governance matters to you, Forgejo (the community fork) is the principled alternative with the same lightweight footprint. CI/CD runners need separate setup, unlike GitLab's integrated approach.