The best Code Hosting & Git Forges
Every option ranked — open-source, self-hostable, and commercial — by our transparent Sovereignty Score, with honest trade-offs so you choose what fits you, not us.
Platforms for hosting Git repositories with pull/merge requests, code review, issue tracking, and CI/CD. Self-hostable git forges let teams keep source code, history, and developer workflows on infrastructure they control.
L5Applications — layer 5 of the AI stack- 1
Forgejo
Top pickOpen sourceCommunity-governed, copyleft self-hosted Git forge.
Free / self-host · in our GitHub comparison →
What is Forgejo? →99sovereignty - 2
Gitea
Open sourcePopular, easy-to-run self-hosted Git service.
Free / self-host (optional paid Enterprise and Cloud tiers) · in our GitHub comparison →
What is Gitea? →98sovereignty - 3
Gogs
Open sourceUltra-lightweight, painless self-hosted Git service.
Free / self-host · in our GitHub comparison →
What is Gogs? →96sovereignty - 4
GitLab Community Edition
Open sourceFull open-source DevOps platform you can self-host.
Free / self-host (CE); paid Enterprise Edition tiers add advanced features · in our GitHub comparison →
What is GitLab Community Edition? →95sovereignty
Is it free?
The free tier, its real limits and where you start paying — read from each vendor's own pricing page and dated.
Run these yourself
What each one actually needs — real RAM, honest running cost, and the setup time nobody quotes.
- Self-hosting Forgejo 2 GB for Forgejo plus PostgreSQL on one box for a 5–20 person team. CI builds need their own machine
- Self-hosting Gitea 2 GB
- Self-hosting Gogs 1 GB for Gogs plus a database. The README says memory use stays low as teams grow
- Self-hosting GitLab Community Edition 16 GB, the vendor's single-node baseline. 8 GB can carry 5–20 people if you disable the bundled Prometheus and trim Sidekiq and Puma as the memory-constrained guide describes
Replacing a specific tool?
Head-to-head comparisons for each popular code hosting & git forges product.
Straight head-to-heads
Two code hosting & git forges tools, side by side — verified facts and a plain verdict.