Forgejo

What hackers pick instead

• GitHubThe default git forge, recommended for its huge community, project discovery and familiar pull-request tooling, though many now complain about frequent outages, AI push and lock-in.764recommend
• GitLabPraised for its strong built-in CI/CD, finer access and group structure, and the option to self-host for full control, though many find it bloated, resource-hungry and cluttered.331recommend
• CodebergA non-profit, community-run code host for open source projects, valued as a Microsoft-free GitHub alternative that bans AI-generated code; critics fault its arbitrary-seeming rules and reliability.331recommend
• GiteaA lightweight, easy-to-run self-hosted GitHub alternative with mirroring and Actions-compatible CI; critics cite vague security fix disclosures, permission gaps and its commercial company ties.195recommend
• TangledA federated GitHub alternative built on AT Protocol, with portable identity and easy self-hosted git servers (knots); critics worry about VC funding and the lack of private repos.127recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 643 comments. Each links to the original.

1. 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.

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Forgejo <=16.0.3 Critical RCE”

2. 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.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “GitHub down again? no PR access”

3. The only problem I've found with Forgejo is a lack of fine grained permissions and also the lack of an API for pulling action invocations.

   Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Incident with Multple GitHub Services”

4. 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.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)”

5. You can literally take the exact same software that Codeberg uses, Forgejo, and stand up your own alternative with different policies

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects”

6. A single tiny golang binary, I think about 200mb. It has 75% of the functionality of gitlab with 5% of the resource requirements.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Ask HN: Due to spam on GitHub, what platforms can I move my projects?”

7. Hosting forgejo is really easy as well. It being a single binary makes it really easy to handle with almost zero maintenance.

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “Show HN: Red Squares – GitHub outages as contributions”

8. Hosting forgejo on a cheap Hetzner server is the best and easiest trick that happened in my work life these last years

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “GitHub and the Crime Against Software”

9. I'm enjoying forgejo as a self-hosted repo. No complaints, and the actions I was using on GH transferred over cleanly.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Ask HN: Due to spam on GitHub, what platforms can I move my projects?”

10. I have found Forgejo’s actions to be functional for my own purposes, although rather incomplete compared with GitHub.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Handling the great code forge fragmentation”

11. Forgejo is a single self-contained ~110MB binary (it contains all assets) you can drop anywhere and it'll just work

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives”

12. I decided to use forgejo, because absent a corporation at least the possibility of a corporate rugpull is reduced.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “I Regret Migrating to Codeberg”

13. Not only do I avoid all the downtime stuff, but E2E builds also takes ~20% of the completion time it used to take

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'”

14. Forgejo is even trivial to set up as it is a single self-contained binary you can throw somewhere and it'd work.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Migrating to the EU”

15. Forgejo is also OSS, so you can easily migrate git and issues and prs and everything to your own hosted instance

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people”

16. Gitea (and its popular fork, Forgejo) are very lightweight. You can easily stand up an instance on a cheap VPS.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Incident with Github.com”

17. I recently moved all my projects to a self-hosted forgejo instance and have found it quite satisfactory so far.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Days Without GitHub Incidents”

18. Forgejo works on the distributed network of projects, so in the future it should be easy to migrate if needed

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Radicle 1.6.0 – Amaryllis”

19. If you need to host git + a nice gui (as opposed to needing to promote your shit) Forgejo is free software.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars”

20. self hosting Forgejo on a small Hetzner instance which also does some static hosting. So far working well.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub”

21. Forgejo is making some steps, but... It's hard to self-host without making contributions really annoying.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Codeberg: ToU extension to prohibit LLM-extrusions”

22. Forgejo does not expose CI build logs via the API so it's hard to make Claude auto-fix a build issue.

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “My Homelab AI Dev Platform”

23. doing so means no one will be able to contribute to the projects, since federation isn't a thing yet

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Bye, Bye GitHub”

24. The "What is Forgejo?" question is unanswered and instead you get a lot of words about their values, their inclusivity, etc.

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “The August 17 outage, and the work ahead”

25. The one thing I hate Forgejo about is for being compatible with Actions and promoting is as the way to go for CI

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Ghostty is leaving GitHub”

26. It's sad that Forgejo went with the actions model from GitHub which introduce a lot of useless complexity

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Bye, Bye GitHub”

27. landing page seems to be activly avoiding the words git and source control leaving it a cryptic mess

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Radicle: The Sovereign Forge”

28. The "What is Forgejo?" question is unanswered and instead you get a lot of words about their values

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “The August 17 outage, and the work ahead”

29. Not sure that page helps much if you're not already bought in to a free-software-absolutist mindset

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Gitea 28.0”

30. forgejo doesn’t have all the actions available that GitHub does nor some of the same functionality

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions”

31. Representatives from the Dutch government recently had a chat with representatives from Forgejo because they are quite interested in migrating their SCM infrastructure from Github to Forgejo.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions”

32. If the set of people who wanted to contribute to Free software split with from those who wanted to work for companies for free, that's an improvement.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits”

33. It provides a nice web interface, and can be configured to create a new repo simply by pushing to a new non-existing repo name, super handy.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “The bare minimum for syncing Git repos”

34. it's fast, has a great API for bots and automations to use, just a Go project so we've been able to make some tweaks to the runner

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub”

35. Gitea's (I use Forgejo) reliance on disk storage is perfect for me because files are well understood as a concept by most people.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Show HN: My Private GitHub on Postgres”

36. I moved all of my personal projects to a self-hosted Forgejo and all my open-source projects to Codeberg and haven't looked back.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “GitLab Announces Workforce Reduction and End of Their CREDIT Values”

37. It'd make the most sense for the Dutch government (or DAWO) to have their own Forgejo instance if the goal is data sovereignty.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS”

38. Owned by companies that do not help the US Federal Government illegally spy on their own citizens and murder children overseas

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability”

39. Forgejo, and by extent Codeberg, has the punchcard-like feature, it‘s just hidden under „Public activity“ on the profile page

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub”

40. I use both Codeberg instance and my selfhosted Forgejo instance (the software behind codeberg) and have no problems with it.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs”