Woodpecker CI vs Forgejo / Gitea Actions
Both are alternatives to GitHub Actions. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Forgejo / Gitea Actions vs Woodpecker CI — same comparison, one verdict.
Woodpecker CI
TOP PICKA small, container-native CI server you can run on one box.
Woodpecker is a community fork of Drone that stayed Apache-2.0 after Drone's licence changed. Every pipeline step is a container, the config is a single YAML file, and the whole server is one Go binary plus an agent — it will run comfortably on hardware you would otherwise consider too small for CI. It plugs into GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Forgejo and Bitbucket, so you can keep hosting code where it is and simply move the build minutes onto your own machine. Of everything here it is the least ceremony for the most control.
Forgejo / Gitea Actions
Actions-compatible CI inside a self-hosted forge.
Forgejo and Gitea both ship a CI runner that speaks the GitHub Actions workflow format, so a large share of existing `.github/workflows` files run unchanged — including many marketplace actions, which are just repositories. That compatibility is the point: it is the only option here where migration can be a copy rather than a rewrite. The trade is that you are adopting a whole forge, not just a build system, so it suits teams already considering moving off GitHub entirely rather than teams that only want cheaper minutes.
Side by side
| Woodpecker CI | Forgejo / Gitea Actions | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 93 | 91 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT (Gitea) / GPL-3.0 (Forgejo) |
| Pricing | Free and open source. You pay only for the machine it runs on. | Free and open source; self-hosted on your own hardware. |
Woodpecker CI is Macrostack's recommended GitHub Actions alternative, so it's our pick here.
Woodpecker CI
Strengths
- +Genuinely Apache-2.0 with no enterprise carve-out
- +Container-per-step model — the pipeline is portable by construction
- +Runs against GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Forgejo and Bitbucket
- +Light enough for a small VPS; no database cluster required
Trade-offs
- −Small ecosystem — no marketplace of ready-made actions
- −You own the runner: patching, disk space and caching are yours
- −No hosted option, so there is nobody to page at 3am
- −Windows and macOS builds need machines you supply
Forgejo / Gitea Actions
Strengths
- +Workflow syntax is Actions-compatible — existing YAML often runs as-is
- +Many GitHub marketplace actions work because they are just repos
- +Comes with the git host, issues and packages in one binary
- +Forgejo is GPL-3.0 and community-governed under Codeberg
Trade-offs
- −Adopting it sensibly means moving your repositories too
- −Compatibility is high but not total — GitHub-specific contexts break
- −Smaller runner ecosystem; scaling out is manual work
- −Two similar projects with a contentious shared history to understand
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-07-30. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.