Updated 20-Jun-2026
Git is great, and even better as a core part of a full development / deployment toolchain. These days there are choices as to which more robust Git platform to use. First, those not to use:
- Github (owned by Microsoft), proprietary
- Gitlab (owned publicly traded company), open core
- Codeberg (privately owned, shit governance), uses Forgejo, a fork of Gitea
All of these are worrisome for privacy and AI scraping issues, and in the case of Codeberg for freedom of use.
Open source Git platforms
There are two main players, though others on the periphery:
Sourcehut
Sourcehut is a small group of devs and a company, which also release their toolset open source (though currently only available for Alpine linux).
Sourcehut is useful and allows for hosting of private and public repositories for a low price. They offer transparency on their income and expenses.
In general, a good project to get behind.
Codeberg / Forgejo
While Codeberg and Forgejo are two different things, the Codeberg organization controls the Forgejo name and domain assets. Forgejo is a hard fork of Gitea, after Gitea transferred its name and domains to a private individual, and is different in a few ways. While Gitea still offers web services, not all of it is open source, and therefore like Gitlab it can be considered open core.
Codeberg is a SAAS for free and open source project git hosting (using Foregjo, of course).
Forgejo is open source and there are binaries for a variety of Linux distributions.
Comparing Forgejo to Gitea, Sourcehut, Gitlab and Github is quite useful., though frankly if you use a bullshit checker you realize that Forgejo is full of it, and basically did a hostile fork. They essentially are able to commandeer the Gitea resources. I've seen this again and again with the Codeberg folks. Yes, it is true open-source can be forked, but these are hostile forks which are dismissing and disingenuous. See also: I'm not sure if I'm a fan of the "no AI fork, created 6 hours ago" genre of post here KeePassXCX.
Bottom Line
When choosing a git platform, the use case can provide insight:
- If one cares about open source, and also wants public hosting of private repositories, and doesn't care as much about private hosting, then Sourcehut is a good choice. Good governance.
- If one cares about open source, and is also interested in self-hosting, and also public hosting of open source repositories, then Gitea is a good choice.
Of course one can use both of these, though learning and using the integration tools for two different platforms can be a lot of work. Actually best to use both: Gitea self-hosted and Sourcehut mirror. Best of both worlds.