GitLab: the most popular and mature GitHub alternative. Generally seen as a more ethical alternative since it’s not owned by MS and is open-sourced, but is still criticized for it’s open-core business model
Bitbucket: the “third party” of the bunch that’s no better than the first
GitTea: the “fourth party” that’s actually cool but kinda not quite there yet. Worth keeping an eye because it’s the most likely to integrate with ActivityPub soon
Gogs: great, but you need to self-host. GitTea is just a community hosted fork of Gogs
SourceForge: wow, they’re still around?
Codeberg: centered around open-source projects only. Managed by a non-profit org
Launchpad: run by Canonical (Ubuntu), has a lot of other features/goals than just hosting code
GitBucket: a self-hostable GitHub clone written in Scala
NotABug: another “liberated” version of Gogs
Radicle: imo, one of the most interesting alternatives to look at. It’s unique in that it’s build on p2p technologies. Unfortunately, it seems quite coupled with many projects in the web3 space
Pagure: RedHat developed git forge that can be selfhosted
Phorge: community fork of Facebook’s internal Phabricator forge tool which was deprecated in 2011 but got a lot of things right that GitHub is often criticized for
Heptapod: Gitlab modified to work with Mercurial
Fossil: self-contained small team collaboration tool doing its own thing entirely
Kallithea: git and hg web frontend with code review functionality (community fork of Rhode code)
RhodeCode: git and hg frontend (original codebase where Kallithea forked off)
Sourcehut: email centric git frontend
Would love to see other people’s one-liner blurbs on these as well
EDIT: added additional alternatives and comments (thanks @poVoq@slrpnk.net especially)
I’ve been looking for a p2p alternative, which would allow a simple workflow. So I had some hope when noticing radicle. But it builds on top of the blockchain hype, I’m afraid. This cryptopedia post shows things I really don’t like.
It’s true git itself is sort of distributed, but trying to develop a workflow on top of pure git is not as easy. Email ones have been worked on, but not everyone is comfortable with them.
A p2p using openDHT would have been my preferred approach. But any ways, I thought radicle could be it. But so far I don’t like what I’m reading, even less with whom they are partnering:
Radicle has already partnered with numerous projects that share its vision via its network-promoting Seeders Program (a Radicle fund), including: Aave, Uniswap, Synthetix, The Graph, Gitcoin, and the Web3 Foundation. The Radicle crypto roadmap includes plans to implement decentralized finance (DeFi) tools and offer support for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). With over a thousand Radicle coding projects completed, this RAD crypto platform has shown that it’s a viable P2P code collaboration platform, one that has the ability to integrate with blockchain-based protocols.
Perhaps I’m just too biased. But if there’s another p2p, hopefully free/libre SW, and non blockchain, then I’d be pretty interested on it…
I can vouch for GitLab. I first heard of it in the self-hosted context. If it goes down, it’ll either get the community supporting it (open source), or at the very least, a plethora of “Guide to GitLab alternatives” style-posts.
Gitea is really worth looking into because it is the one most likely to get working ActivityPub federation soon. But recently there was some controversy about them forming a for-profit company and collecting VC funds, so probably places like Codeberg will switch to a community run fork soon.
What’s wrong with GitLab? Definitely the most mature alternative.
If you’re really interested in something that will not go down or get discontinued anytime soon, I’d also suggest taking a look at Radicle which is P2P and free
GitLab was known to be a resource hog not too long ago. I cannot comment on its current state, as I don’t use it, but someone I know has to maintain an instance with a few developers and they have a cronjob to kill the system and reboot it every once in a while because GitLab eats the system if not restarted every once in a while…
https://codeberg.org which is a non-profit organization. It is free of charge, so it is democratic enabling people to use its services. You can even join the foundation https://join.codeberg.org/
BUT it uses Gitea, which registered two for-profit companies in Hong Kong… Codeberg is soft forking it because the now Gitea shareholders / trademark owners made it clear they want to maximize profits.
If you care about promoting a democratic platform for everyone, do not use sourcehut. They will charge later on; their current free model enables both gathering users (potential clients) and making you a free tester/qa for them. I believe “financial aid” is undemocratic; free should be default. If anything, it should just require commercial, for-profit entities to pay; because then by default there is no processual need for “financial aid”. We should not trust any for-profit, commercial organization anyway for such important services/platforms (version control system hosting is crucial).
From the beta onwards, unpaid accounts will be limited to read-only access to their own projects. Affected users will be emailed at least 60 days in advance of the transition. Users who host their own instance of Sourcehut, on their own servers, will be unaffected by this. Additionally, financial aid will be provided to those who cannot pay; no one is going to be priced out.
I think you are doing sourcehut injustice as it is pretty much a “one guy” run service trying to make it an income generating job for himself. Asking for subscriptions is not unethical in that regard and you pretty much get what you pay for in that case.
Personally I don’t like sourcehut much because it relies too much on email and selfhosting it is a mess (but it is all FOSS) so I would not recommend using it, but overall it is not a bad service.
He generating a job for himself is not what I criticize. I criticize promoting an undemocratic service for something so crucial that needs to be democratic which includes free service by default (otherwise you do not stand a chance against moving people out of GitHub and the like). I would never recommend to people in general a commercial and thus undemocratic service for key development (vcs).
And did it occur to you it is a “one guy” show probably because he wants it that way? That is prone to authoritarianism, and prone that sourcehut maintainer to make it a very profitable business just like GitLab and now Gitea unless founding a proper non-profit organization? A blog post about not being driven by profit is not enough; make it a proper non-profit registered organization.
In any case OP explicitly asked for a free service (which sourcehut in the future won’t be).
You are making it sound like a “non-profit” is a magical solution to running a service. All it does it adding some tax regulations and making it difficult for non-worker owners to extract rent profits. Most “non-profits” are controlled by a few people that thus can decide their own salaries and make a profit any ways.
And there is no such thing as a “free” service. Someone needs to pay for the infrastructure and operating costs one way or the other. It is just a question of how direct that payment is and if it is affordable by poorer people.
We are hosting 42010 repositories, created and maintained by 34042 users. Compared to one month ago, this is an organic growth rate of +3372 repositories (+8.7% month-over-month) and +2271 users (+7.1%).
another vote for Gitea - much easier to host than gitlab in my experience, lots of great features (e.g. it can work as a single sign on system for other apps, host docker images and PHP packages, and integrates well with Drone for CI/CD), and if you don’t wanna run it yourself I’ll also big up Codeberg as another person suggested
Lots of people say Sourcehut, and I agree. It may not always be free, but I believe it’s still free for OSS projects. All of the sourcecode is available, and the instructions for running your own servers is decent. It’s been around for years, and I’d be surprised if it went down; it’s never had an outage as long as I’ve been using it.
It has source repos, issue tracking, CI, mailing lists, and wikis. The pages are also lightweight, with little to no javascript.
You might find it ugly. It has no web-based PR/merge tooling (but has instructions on how to manage PR/merging using the mailing lists). It has a couple of restrictions on what kinds of projects you can host with gem (no cryptocurrency projects). It’s a developer’s tool, and built for people who have a fair amount of competency outside of web interfaces.
I love Sourcehut; I’ve been paying for it since before I needed to, and even though I’m not using it for commercial purposes… but it’s not for everyone.
well, it seems soucehut will have a web based work flow, or so it seems from this postmarketos post:
We talked to Drew DeVault (the main developer of SourceHut) and he told us that having the whole review process in the web UI available is one of the top priorities for SourceHut
…
SourceHut is prioritising to implement an entirely web-based flow for contributors.
This things don’t happen in one day, so don’t hold your breath yet, but it seems it’s coming at some point…
I think the site is clean and pretty. I’ve also been paying for it for a couple of years now ($2/mo, I think). Hosting costs need to be covered somehow and if you’re not paying for it, then it’s likely data about you is being sold in some way.
NLNet (the same org that funds lemmy development and a lot of other great open-source projects), has funded to make gitea federated, but so far there hasn’t been much movement on it afaik.
Gitea is already far better than github, but because it lacks federation, you have to make tons of accounts on each different server.
I do like codeberg a lot, but unfortunately they are harsh with taking down torrent-related projects. I had to move a few of my repos off there bc of it.
@Icarus surprised to not see cgit here yet. https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/
free (libre) and fast, easy to host
Let’s do em all!:
Would love to see other people’s one-liner blurbs on these as well
EDIT: added additional alternatives and comments (thanks @poVoq@slrpnk.net especially)
I’ve been looking for a p2p alternative, which would allow a simple workflow. So I had some hope when noticing radicle. But it builds on top of the blockchain hype, I’m afraid. This cryptopedia post shows things I really don’t like.
It’s true
gititself is sort of distributed, but trying to develop a workflow on top of puregitis not as easy. Email ones have been worked on, but not everyone is comfortable with them.A p2p using openDHT would have been my preferred approach. But any ways, I thought radicle could be it. But so far I don’t like what I’m reading, even less with whom they are partnering:
Perhaps I’m just too biased. But if there’s another p2p, hopefully free/libre SW, and non blockchain, then I’d be pretty interested on it…
I can vouch for GitLab. I first heard of it in the self-hosted context. If it goes down, it’ll either get the community supporting it (open source), or at the very least, a plethora of “Guide to GitLab alternatives” style-posts.
Gitea is really worth looking into because it is the one most likely to get working ActivityPub federation soon. But recently there was some controversy about them forming a for-profit company and collecting VC funds, so probably places like Codeberg will switch to a community run fork soon.
There is also:
Ah didn’t realize there was a Phabricator successor, thanks, will add these and your comments on GitTea to the main post
All the alternatives! Gitlab is the most ubiquitous alternative in the privacy community I’ve seen. Seems to work quite well.
GitHub is propietary software (which goes agaisnt this community).
GitLab.com instance runs GitLab Enterprise Edition which is propietary. TeDoMun offers an instance using the Community Edition which is FLOSS.
I would recommend SourceHut (sr.ht) or Gitea (codeberg.org, git.disroot.org, etc)
What’s wrong with GitLab? Definitely the most mature alternative.
If you’re really interested in something that will not go down or get discontinued anytime soon, I’d also suggest taking a look at Radicle which is P2P and free
GitLab was known to be a resource hog not too long ago. I cannot comment on its current state, as I don’t use it, but someone I know has to maintain an instance with a few developers and they have a cronjob to kill the system and reboot it every once in a while because GitLab eats the system if not restarted every once in a while…
I believe that their open-core business model is the biggest con. New features aren’t guaranteed to land on the free version.
I see, I wasn’t aware. Thanks for the info!
https://codeberg.org which is a non-profit organization. It is free of charge, so it is democratic enabling people to use its services. You can even join the foundation https://join.codeberg.org/
BUT it uses Gitea, which registered two for-profit companies in Hong Kong… Codeberg is soft forking it because the now Gitea shareholders / trademark owners made it clear they want to maximize profits.
If you care about promoting a democratic platform for everyone, do not use sourcehut. They will charge later on; their current free model enables both gathering users (potential clients) and making you a free tester/qa for them. I believe “financial aid” is undemocratic; free should be default. If anything, it should just require commercial, for-profit entities to pay; because then by default there is no processual need for “financial aid”. We should not trust any for-profit, commercial organization anyway for such important services/platforms (version control system hosting is crucial).
I think you are doing sourcehut injustice as it is pretty much a “one guy” run service trying to make it an income generating job for himself. Asking for subscriptions is not unethical in that regard and you pretty much get what you pay for in that case.
Personally I don’t like sourcehut much because it relies too much on email and selfhosting it is a mess (but it is all FOSS) so I would not recommend using it, but overall it is not a bad service.
He generating a job for himself is not what I criticize. I criticize promoting an undemocratic service for something so crucial that needs to be democratic which includes free service by default (otherwise you do not stand a chance against moving people out of GitHub and the like). I would never recommend to people in general a commercial and thus undemocratic service for key development (vcs).
And did it occur to you it is a “one guy” show probably because he wants it that way? That is prone to authoritarianism, and prone that sourcehut maintainer to make it a very profitable business just like GitLab and now Gitea unless founding a proper non-profit organization? A blog post about not being driven by profit is not enough; make it a proper non-profit registered organization.
In any case OP explicitly asked for a free service (which sourcehut in the future won’t be).
You are making it sound like a “non-profit” is a magical solution to running a service. All it does it adding some tax regulations and making it difficult for non-worker owners to extract rent profits. Most “non-profits” are controlled by a few people that thus can decide their own salaries and make a profit any ways.
And there is no such thing as a “free” service. Someone needs to pay for the infrastructure and operating costs one way or the other. It is just a question of how direct that payment is and if it is affordable by poorer people.
We have Codeberg. So there is no need in recommending sourcehut if the priority is promoting democratic services.
Codeberg is nice overall, but I fear centralizing on them is a really bad idea (and there are signs of that happening already).
What are the signs? Gitea federation is being worked on. The Gitea fork is needed to address the Gitea for-profit issue.
https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-hackathon-translation-service-more.html
I hope Gitea federation will reduce this trend, but for now this centralisation is not good at all.
another vote for Gitea - much easier to host than gitlab in my experience, lots of great features (e.g. it can work as a single sign on system for other apps, host docker images and PHP packages, and integrates well with Drone for CI/CD), and if you don’t wanna run it yourself I’ll also big up Codeberg as another person suggested
Lots of people say Sourcehut, and I agree. It may not always be free, but I believe it’s still free for OSS projects. All of the sourcecode is available, and the instructions for running your own servers is decent. It’s been around for years, and I’d be surprised if it went down; it’s never had an outage as long as I’ve been using it.
It has source repos, issue tracking, CI, mailing lists, and wikis. The pages are also lightweight, with little to no javascript.
You might find it ugly. It has no web-based PR/merge tooling (but has instructions on how to manage PR/merging using the mailing lists). It has a couple of restrictions on what kinds of projects you can host with gem (no cryptocurrency projects). It’s a developer’s tool, and built for people who have a fair amount of competency outside of web interfaces.
I love Sourcehut; I’ve been paying for it since before I needed to, and even though I’m not using it for commercial purposes… but it’s not for everyone.
well, it seems soucehut will have a web based work flow, or so it seems from this postmarketos post:
This things don’t happen in one day, so don’t hold your breath yet, but it seems it’s coming at some point…
Sure, and that would attract more people for certain. Current workflows are established and work really well, too.
I think the site is clean and pretty. I’ve also been paying for it for a couple of years now ($2/mo, I think). Hosting costs need to be covered somehow and if you’re not paying for it, then it’s likely data about you is being sold in some way.
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sourcehut
I like to use this website when I want an alternative to what I’m using: https://alternativeto.net/software/github/
How about switching to https://www.opensourcealternative.to/ ?
Me too! While the site itself is not FOSS, it has a handy Open source filter when looking for alternatives.
Codeberg.org
Gitlab Community edition self hosted. E.g with my arm64 Docket Image. The source code can be found on my instance, gitlab and github 🙂
You can get a public ip address for it if you want to share/collaborate using noip or similar service and a few minutes setting up your router.
NLNet (the same org that funds lemmy development and a lot of other great open-source projects), has funded to make gitea federated, but so far there hasn’t been much movement on it afaik.
Gitea is already far better than github, but because it lacks federation, you have to make tons of accounts on each different server.
if the admin has turned on the option, folks can log in with github or gitlab or discord or a community OAuth/LDAP/etc server.
full federation will be great, but there’s technically more options than just “tons of accounts” right now already.
can’t find docs, but the web admin interface makes it pretty easy to set up.
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I do like codeberg a lot, but unfortunately they are harsh with taking down torrent-related projects. I had to move a few of my repos off there bc of it.