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Comment by michael_michael | Hacker News Reader

Are there any alternatives to Github that offer similar bang for the buck? Particularly for very small teams or solo devs that need private repos? The author here specifically mentions Codeberg, which seems like it's just for FOSS projects.

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You can self host the software underlying Codeberg, which is Forgejo. Then there is also GitLab which has a lot more features but is arguably more intensive to maintain. And then there is the long tail, such as the projects Forgejo was forged from (Gitea and Gogs) and various other FOSS forges e.g. Phorge which was forked from the now discontinued Phabricator.

What are the advantages of Forgejo over Gitea?

The point of GitHub is not technical - the website is terrible. It's the social network.

That’s interesting. I would have said the opposite. I’ve never used any of the social features, but the technical aspects (including integrations) are where the value is.

It does break and go down; and GHA are a real pain in the ass. But the basic hosting and PR workflow are fine.

The PR workflow is fine if you don’t care about stacked PRs, you don’t write reviews, you don’t read nontrivial reviews, and you don’t need the diff viewer.

You should use your IDE to do all of those things. Much better that way.

The site UI has been going downhill these years. It's become heavy and slow, and the buttons are more and more randomly placed. Like after you search for something in the repo, to go back to the repo front page you needed to click on the most unexpected button.

It's still getting things done, for sure, but no longer pleasant to work with.

I think Github has a nice UI.....when the contents finishes loading.

That's the real problem with Github these days. Too much critical information behind throbbers that take their sweet time. I find Codeberg much more responsive, despite being an ocean away and having the occasional anti-AI-scraper screen.

Some competitors like Gitlab have reduced friction by offering "Login with Github", so if you've already got a Github account, the bar for signing up some alternative forges is low.

I help with one of the most popular projects on Codeberg, Fuzzel. I can say we get no shortage of issues and feature requests from being on an alternative forge. Indeed, we have plenty!

What is the value of the social network? I discover code by looking for a package in my language via a search engine. Whether it’s GitHub/GitLab/Gittea/etc doesn’t matter as long as it’s indexed by the search engine.

I like sourcehut. It's the only forge out there that isn't set out to copy the Github UI like everyone else. And its UI itself feels instantaneous, as if it was running locally.

I also like it, particularly for its outstanding CI, but I don't like the patch/email-centric approach. (Gave it a try, didn't have a good time.)

The UI is fast, but it can be difficult to navigate, at least if you aren't familiar with it. In particular, unless it is explicitly mentioned in the README, it isn't at all clear how to report a bug, or submit a patch, or view relevant mailing list archives.

> In particular, unless it is explicitly mentioned in the README, it isn't at all clear how to report a bug, or submit a patch, or view relevant mailing list archives.

Those are meant to be mentioned in the README. Each of sourcehut's parts including the repo frontend, project page, mailing list, task list, documentation pages, etc are independent. There is no predefined way in which these are associated with each other like on GitHub. For example, I use a single mailing list for all of my FOSS projects.

sourcehut is a product that feels like it was just built for me and what I care about, I absolutely love the design. But it's tough to use for a team that isn't building open source software. Your teammates will probably be perplexed by the UI because it's so different. The tooling for sending and receiving patches is quite poor, there is no decent GUI email client with patch support. There's also no organization support or ability to apply principle of least access like with a codeowners file.

Stick with Github if it solves your problem. No particular reason to move off, only reasons I've seen so far is "don't like Microsoft" and "Don't like the UI". But overall, GitHub is the leading tech in this space. For FOSS, I can see why some may want to move off, but for commercial work, it's great. Seems to be a bit of a bandwagon of articles of people moving off hitting hackernews (which in reality represents a tiny percentage of users), no need to hop on the bandwagon unless you have some compelling reasons for something else.

GitLab. There's also the option of self hosting it on a cheap server if you don't like cloud services.

Unfortunately, GitLab is no longer Fit for Purpose since it caps the maximum size of Merge Requests (aka PRs), and anything over that size just isn't shown in the Merge Request.

This bit us recently at my work where there was an important MR needing review, and over 1/2 of it couldn't be viewed in the GitLab web interface by any means.

It's a (mis) "feature" they're aware of, and have no plan to fix before 2027 at the earliest.

Needless to say, we're migrating off it and recommend others do the same.

If you want bang for your buck, and you use free GitHub Actions, then no.

Azure Devops, free for up to 5 users. Free runners Free private repositories Plus work item tracking

I looked into this recently. But came up with.. nothing that worked me.

I think I was looking for something like Migadu[1] for git hosting. Cheap, private and for personal use. The best option is probably to self host.

I tried to fish out some ideas with an ASK HN thread but it did not get any attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011054

I have started putting my new stuff in Codeberg. Some of the private projects have manually update private mirrors on GCP (free so far).

[1] https://migadu.com/pricing/

Sourcehut [1] is another interesting one.

[1] https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/

Gitlab is pretty good, plus you can self host it if you really want. It's an interesting company too, they're 100% remote.

Note that private repos are supported on Codeberg. (I would link to one of mine, but you'd just see a 404 :P)

Yes, but you are still not allowed to use them for proprietary software development. That makes it quite useless for most teams developing commercial software.

You can’t pay to use it for commercial purposes?

bitbucket?

Gittea for self hosting is something I always wanted to try.

I have to interact with bitbucket on a daily basis. My advice is not just "no" but "heck no."

Bitbucket is slow to push to and pull from. From a reliability standpoint I have far more issues with Bitbucket than Github. The web UI feels completely off in a way that's hard to describe if you've never used it - it's like it was created as an afterthought or a skin on an older system, without any sort of craftsmanship behind it. There's also no source code search.

There's probably more, but quite honestly I try and stay out of the web interface of my bitbucket repos as much as humanly possible, so I shall stay happily ignorant of the rest. It's a shame, because I remember Bitbucket when it was the Github for Mercurial with a decent (if derivative) interface, and they allowed you to have private repositories without paying money.

Now, Bitbucket no longer supports Mercurial and Github gives you private repositories. Given those realities, why anybody would ever choose Bitbucket in TYOOL 2025 is beyond my ken.

<s>There's nothing about Codeberg that's FOSS only afaict.</s>

This was incorrect, I misread the changes to the TOS.

Codeberg requires that the repos you host are FOSS

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1219 Not true anymore.

From the current Terms of Service:

  Private repositories are only allowed for things required for FLOSS projects, like storing secrets, team-internal discussions or hiding projects from the public until they're ready for usage and/or contribution.

  They are also allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.

So the ToS says only private repos that support FLOSS, but then backdoors into "small & personal stuff" which is pretty loose and up to Codeberg's discretion so probably not the best place for your private side project repos.

You're right, and after thinking about it a bit more, I think this TOS is actually more confusing than what came before. Saying explicitly that, e.g. MIT licensed software was allowed (because that license is approved by OSI), makes it unambiguous. This feels like if someone complained or had too many repos they're liable to get nuked from orbit. That being said Forgejo is FLOSS and this service is hosted for free so they're allowed to set whatever terms they want. I'll delete my upthread comment as it's misinfo.

No problem. I'm confused by it as well. I migrated a repo that is more source available than open source and didn't realize that it probably is against ToS until afterwards.

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