Gitea vs GitLab CE vs Forgejo: Self-Hosting Git for a Small Dev Team
If your team is paying for GitHub Team/Enterprise or GitLab.com seats just to get private repos, issues, and CI, self-hosting can cut that recurring cost to whatever a small VM or homelab box already costs you. All three options here are free and open source — the real decision is how much hardware you want to dedicate and how much DevOps platform you actually need in one box.
Search intent
Someone searching “Gitea vs GitLab CE vs Forgejo” has already decided to self-host Git instead of paying for GitHub or GitLab.com seats, and is choosing between a lightweight forge and a full DevOps platform.
Quick take
- Want the lightest resource footprint and the most active community direction in 2026: Forgejo
- Already running Gitea and it works fine: stay on Gitea — no urgent reason to migrate
- Need built-in CI/CD, container registry, and security scanning without bolting on separate tools: GitLab CE
The three options
Gitea is a lightweight, single-binary Git forge written in Go — install it, point it at a database (SQLite is fine for small teams), and you get pull requests, issues, a wiki, package/container registries, Git LFS, and GitHub-Actions-compatible CI runners. It’s company-backed (Gitea Ltd.) rather than run by a foundation.
Forgejo is a community-governed fork of Gitea, created in October 2022 after Gitea’s domains and trademark were transferred to a for-profit entity without community sign-off. Codeberg e.V., a German non-profit, took over stewardship. The two codebases were near-identical at first, but Forgejo became a full hard fork in February 2024 and stopped syncing changes from Gitea — by 2026 it’s the default recommendation in most self-hosting communities (r/selfhosted, Awesome-Selfhosted), largely on governance grounds rather than a feature gap. If you’re already happily running Gitea, there’s no pressing technical reason to migrate; if you’re starting fresh, Forgejo’s community governance is the more future-proof bet.
GitLab Community Edition is a different class of tool: a full DevOps platform with built-in CI/CD pipelines, a container/package registry, Pages hosting, and security scanning, all in one installation — no separate Jenkins or Actions runner needed. GitLab CE is MIT-licensed; GitLab’s paid tiers (Premium/Ultimate, self-managed or GitLab.com-hosted) are Enterprise Edition, a separate proprietary codebase with additional features layered on top of CE. The cost of that “everything in one box” convenience is hardware: GitLab’s own docs put the minimum at 4 GB RAM (supporting up to 500 users), with 8 GB+ recommended for a more comfortable single-node install — several times what Gitea or Forgejo need.
Resource footprint compared
- Gitea: runs comfortably on roughly 512 MB RAM; a small team’s instance idles well under that.
- Forgejo: effectively identical to Gitea’s footprint — same Go codebase lineage, same single-binary deploy model.
- GitLab CE: GitLab’s official requirements start at 4 GB RAM minimum; undersized instances (1-2 GB) are prone to out-of-memory kills without swap configured. Budget a dedicated VM or a reasonably specced mini PC, not a spare Raspberry Pi.
Feature comparison
| Gitea | Forgejo | GitLab CE | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pull requests, issues, wiki | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Built-in CI/CD | GitHub-Actions-compatible runners | GitHub-Actions-compatible runners | Native GitLab CI/CD pipelines |
| Container/package registry | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Security scanning (SAST/dependency) | No (third-party via CI) | No (third-party via CI) | Yes, built in |
| Governance | Company (Gitea Ltd.) | Non-profit (Codeberg e.V.) | Company (GitLab Inc.), CE is MIT-licensed |
| Typical minimum RAM | ~512 MB | ~512 MB | 4 GB |
Which one should you actually pick?
- A small dev team (2-10 people) that wants code hosting, PRs, and lightweight CI on a cheap VM or homelab box: Forgejo — the community-governance story matters less than the fact that it’s the same low-resource forge with the more actively engaged project direction as of 2026.
- A team already running Gitea with no complaints: keep running it; migrating to Forgejo is a nice-to-have, not an urgent fix.
- A team that wants CI/CD pipelines, a container registry, and security scanning bundled into the same platform as code review, and has the RAM to spare: GitLab CE. Pair it with a reverse proxy to put it behind HTTPS on your own domain.
- A team already comparing self-hosted platforms for internal docs: see BookStack vs Outline vs Confluence for the wiki side of the same “stop paying for SaaS seats” move.
VPS/hosting referral placeholder — swap for a real hosting or VPS affiliate link once a program is confirmed; none of these three tools themselves have anything to affiliate-link (all free, self-hosted, open source).
Bottom line
There’s no wrong technical choice among these three — the meaningful split is resource budget (GitLab CE needs a real VM; Gitea/Forgejo run on almost anything) and how much you weigh project governance (Forgejo’s non-profit structure vs. Gitea’s commercial one). For most small dev teams self-hosting Git for the first time, Forgejo is the safer default in 2026; reach for GitLab CE specifically when you want CI/CD and security scanning unified with code review rather than assembled from separate tools.