# Forgejo 380 Hacker News commenters recommended Forgejo and 67 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 1 years (26 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** A lightweight, free self-hosted GitHub alternative that runs as a single binary with little maintenance and good Actions compatibility, though its CI is less complete and contributor federation is missing. ## Why people recommend it - Single binary, easy to host (7 comments): "A single tiny golang binary, I think about 200mb. It has 75% of the functionality of gitlab with 5% of the resource requirements." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611762)) "Hosting forgejo is really easy as well. It being a single binary makes it really easy to handle with almost zero maintenance." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035157)) "Forgejo is a single self-contained ~110MB binary (it contains all assets) you can drop anywhere and it'll just work" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845086)) - Low maintenance, avoids GitHub downtime (5 comments): "The amount of time I need to spend maintaining my Forgejo instance this year, even after accounting for this RCE, has been less than the amount of time GitHub has been degraded or unavailable this year." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650851)) "Hosting forgejo is really easy as well. It being a single binary makes it really easy to handle with almost zero maintenance." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48035157)) "Not only do I avoid all the downtime stuff, but E2E builds also takes ~20% of the completion time it used to take" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947612)) - GitHub Actions migrate cleanly (3 comments): "I had migrated a custom action which interacted with the PR it was run inside of using the GitHub JS client, and I didn't have to change a line." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49333650)) "Forgejo has the closest compatibility among the three in practice, and if you are fully off Github, I think it's a good enough choice." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49236730)) "I'm enjoying forgejo as a self-hosted repo. No complaints, and the actions I was using on GH transferred over cleanly." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48613039)) - Open source, no corporate rugpull (5 comments): "I decided to use forgejo, because absent a corporation at least the possibility of a corporate rugpull is reduced." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49033199)) "Forgejo is also OSS, so you can easily migrate git and issues and prs and everything to your own hosted instance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47533628)) "If you need to host git + a nice gui (as opposed to needing to promote your shit) Forgejo is free software." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47524308)) ## What people warn about - Actions incomplete versus GitHub (4 comments): "I have found Forgejo’s actions to be functional for my own purposes, although rather incomplete compared with GitHub." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48215126)) "forgejo doesn’t have all the actions available that GitHub does nor some of the same functionality" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46296225)) "Forgejo does not expose CI build logs via the API so it's hard to make Claude auto-fix a build issue." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545060)) - Dislike of GitHub Actions model (2 comments): "The one thing I hate Forgejo about is for being compatible with Actions and promoting is as the way to go for CI" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47960551)) "It's sad that Forgejo went with the actions model from GitHub which introduce a lot of useless complexity" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49484856)) - No federation hampers outside contributions (2 comments): "Forgejo is making some steps, but... It's hard to self-host without making contributions really annoying." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49005214)) "doing so means no one will be able to contribute to the projects, since federation isn't a thing yet" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49484879)) - Website doesn't explain what it is (4 comments): "The "What is Forgejo?" question is unanswered and instead you get a lot of words about their values, their inclusivity, etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49380755)) "landing page seems to be activly avoiding the words git and source control leaving it a cryptic mess" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46739456)) "The "What is Forgejo?" question is unanswered and instead you get a lot of words about their values" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49379482)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [GitHub](https://hackerapproved.com/p/github.md): 764 recommend - [GitLab](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gitlab.md): 331 recommend - [Codeberg](https://hackerapproved.com/p/codeberg.md): 331 recommend - [Gitea](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gitea.md): 195 recommend - [Tangled](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tangled.md): 127 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Forgejo", https://hackerapproved.com/p/forgejo/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).