Gitea

Gitea is a self-hosted, all-in-one Git service that ships as a single Go binary and runs on as little as 256 MB of RAM. We rate it 80/100 — the right choice for teams who want a GitHub-style experience without GitLab's resource bill, provided they understand its for-profit governance trade-off versus the Forgejo fork.

What is Gitea?

Gitea began as a community fork of Gogs in November 2016 and shipped its 1.0 release on December 24, 2016. The project is maintained by Gitea Ltd. (the for-profit company that controls the trademark and now sells Gitea Cloud and Gitea Enterprise) together with hundreds of community contributors. As of April 2026, the GitHub repository at go-gitea/gitea sits past 49,000 stars and remains one of the most active Go projects on the platform.

The pitch is simple: every feature you need to host code internally — repositories, pull requests, issues, wikis, package registries, container registry, and a GitHub Actions–compatible CI runner — wrapped in a single self-contained binary that you can run on a Raspberry Pi or a $5 VPS. That focus on resource efficiency is what keeps Gitea on the shortlist for homelabs, small startups, and air-gapped enterprises who would otherwise be forced toward the 8 GB-minimum GitLab CE stack.

Key Features of Gitea

• Single-binary deployment: One Go executable plus SQLite, MySQL, or Postgres. Idle memory hovers around ~400 MB and the official Docker image is under 110 MB compressed.
• Gitea Actions: A drop-in CI runner that consumes GitHub Actions YAML workflows. You can re-use most public Actions from the GitHub Marketplace by mirroring them into a local registry.
• Package registry for 20+ formats: Cargo, Composer, Conan, Conda, Container (OCI), Helm, Maven, npm, NuGet, Pub, PyPI, RubyGems, Vagrant, Generic, Go modules, and more — all hosted next to your code with the same auth.
• Code review workflows: Both standard pull-request review and the AGit flow (push directly to a magic ref to open a PR without forking) are supported.
• Federated identity: SAML, OAuth2, OIDC, LDAP, SMTP, PAM, and Kerberos authentication out of the box, with SCIM provisioning available on Enterprise.
• Mirroring and migration: One-click import from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Gitea, Gogs, OneDev, and self-hosted Git URLs — including issues, releases, and labels.

What Users Say About Gitea

On the r/selfhosted subreddit, Gitea is consistently the top-recommended Git server for homelabs alongside Forgejo, with users praising the “set it and forget it” install and minimal CPU footprint. The recurring complaints are concrete: documentation lags new features by several minor releases, the desktop UI density is dated compared with GitHub, and Gitea Actions still misses some GitHub Actions edge cases (matrix expressions, large-file artifact uploads). On Hacker News, the most-discussed thread of the past year focused on the 2022 split that produced Forgejo — many commenters now run Forgejo for governance reasons but still recommend Gitea for teams that want commercial support. G2 reviewers give Gitea a 4.5/5 average and consistently call out “low resource use” and “easy migration from GitHub” as their top reasons to buy.

Gitea Pricing

The self-hosted Community Edition is free and open source under the MIT license with unlimited users and repositories. Gitea Cloud and Gitea Enterprise add managed hosting, SAML SSO, audit logs, autoscaling Kubernetes runners, and SLA-backed support.

Plan	Price	Key Limits
Community (self-hosted)	$0 forever	Unlimited users, repos, and Actions runners. MIT licensed.
Gitea Cloud	From $10/mo	Managed hosting, automatic upgrades, included CI minutes.
Enterprise Cloud	$9.50–$19/user/mo	SAML SSO, audit logs, Kubernetes autoscaling runners, 12-month commit.
Enterprise Self-Managed	Contact sales	Adds branch protection rules engine, advanced compliance, premium support.

Who Should Use Gitea?

Best for: Solo developers and small-to-mid teams (5–200 engineers) who want a familiar GitHub-style UX on hardware they control, homelab enthusiasts who can’t stomach GitLab’s memory footprint, and regulated organisations that need an air-gapped Git platform with built-in package and container registries.

Not ideal for: Teams that need GitLab-grade DevSecOps (native SAST, DAST, dependency scanning, value-stream analytics) out of the box, or community-governance purists — for them, the Forgejo fork under Codeberg e.V. is a better political fit.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Runs comfortably on 256 MB of RAM with SQLite — verified by countless homelab benchmarks.
• Single binary plus a config file: install on Linux, BSD, macOS, or Windows in under 5 minutes.
• Built-in package registry covers more formats (20+) than GitLab CE’s native registry.
• Actively maintained — multiple stable releases per year and a transparent public roadmap.

Cons:

• Trademark and domain are owned by a for-profit company; some features now ship Enterprise-first.
• End-to-end and upgrade tests are limited — Forgejo’s test matrix is broader.
• Gitea Actions still has gaps versus GitHub Actions (notably matrix expansions and some artifact APIs).
• Docs occasionally trail the product, so new features sometimes need source-code spelunking.

Alternatives to Gitea

Forgejo is a community-governed, drop-in fork run by Codeberg e.V. — pick it if non-profit governance and a wider test suite matter more than the Cloud/Enterprise add-ons. GitLab CE is the heavyweight choice with native CI/CD, SAST, and DAST baked in — but it needs 8 GB of RAM minimum. GitHub Enterprise Server is the obvious option if you already pay for GitHub and need the polished UI, while Gogs, the project Gitea was forked from, is still maintained but has a much smaller contributor base.

Verdict: Is Gitea Worth It?

For most self-hosted Git workloads in 2026, Gitea is still the path of least resistance. Install is fast, the binary is tiny, the feature set covers Git, CI, and packages, and Enterprise support is now an option for teams who need an SLA. The 80/100 rating reflects two real caveats: Forgejo has caught up on features and now leads on community governance and testing, and GitLab still wins on out-of-the-box DevSecOps. Pick Gitea when you want a familiar GitHub feel, a single Go binary, and the option to upgrade to a paid plan later.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Gitea free?

Yes. The self-hosted Community Edition is free and open source under the MIT license with unlimited users and repositories. Managed Gitea Cloud starts at $10/month, and Enterprise Cloud is $9.50–$19 per user per month with a 12-month commitment.

What platforms does Gitea support?

Gitea ships as a single Go binary for Linux (x86_64, ARM64, ARMv6, ARMv7), macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD. There’s an official Docker image and Kubernetes Helm chart, plus packages for most major distros.

How does Gitea compare to Forgejo?

Forgejo is a community-governed fork of Gitea run by Codeberg e.V., a German non-profit. Feature parity is close, but Forgejo has wider end-to-end and upgrade tests and stronger governance, while Gitea offers commercial Enterprise support and Cloud hosting.

Is Gitea open source?

Yes. The Community Edition is MIT-licensed and developed in the open at github.com/go-gitea/gitea. Gitea Enterprise adds proprietary modules on top of the open core.

Does Gitea have CI/CD built in?

Yes. Gitea Actions is a built-in CI/CD runner that is compatible with GitHub Actions YAML, so you can re-use most existing workflows without changes.