How to self-host your GitHub alternative
Self-hosting your code forge means deciding first how much platform you actually want to stand up: just Git repos, or a full DevOps cycle with integrated CI/CD and a container registry. And if you're after the former, there's still a second question left — who governs the project you're about to depend on.
Tools that meet this intent
Alternative to GitHub
Lightweight Git platform, a self-hosted alternative to GitHub.
Alternative to GitHub
Complete DevOps platform (Git + CI/CD), an alternative to GitHub.
Alternative to GitHub, GitLab
Gitea's community fork, a lightweight Git forge with 100% open governance.
Real server requirements
Between 256MB and 1GB of RAM depending on the tool — never a single number.
Gitea and GitLab CE cover very different scopes. Gitea is a lightweight Git forge — repos, issues, PRs, wiki and Actions compatible with GitHub Actions syntax — and runs, as the project itself documents, perfectly on a 1GB-RAM VPS. GitLab CE is a full DevOps platform: besides Git it includes CI/CD with no external tools and its own container registry — but that has a real resource cost: 4GB+ of RAM recommended per its own deployment requirements, notably more than Gitea.
Forgejo is a special case: it's a community fork of Gitea, born specifically for 100% open governance with no company behind it — it shares most of the same codebase, so its resource footprint is similarly light. One fact worth knowing if licensing matters to you: Forgejo moved from MIT to GPL-3.0-or-later in August 2024, while Gitea remains MIT — check the implications if you plan to distribute a modified version of either one.
What you gain and lose versus the SaaS
If all you need is hosting code with issues and PRs, Gitea or Forgejo cover that with a fraction of the resources GitLab CE asks for — the difference isn't cosmetic, it's a full DevOps platform versus a focused Git forge. Choosing between Gitea and Forgejo is less a technical question (they start from the same code) and more a question of which governance model you prefer: Gitea has a commercial offering behind it (Open-Core in our classification); Forgejo is explicitly community-run, with no commercial entity.