Gitlab vs. Gogs vs. Gitea

All of you might know Github, the number one choice for hosting open source projects. But what if you want to host your code on your own server and not on a third party service?

Then you might have heard about Gitlab. Gitlab is - I think - the most powerful competitor in this business. It supports almost everything:

• Issue Tracking
• Viewing Code
• Continuous Integration (Gitlab CI)
• Integrations
• Wiki
• and so on..

But as it has a lot of really “cool” features, it also needs a lot of memory, CPU and so on.

On the other hand there is Gogs and Gitea, minimalistic competitors written in Go. I describe both in one paragraph, because they’re almost equivalent. Gitea is a fork of Gogs. But why? The owner of Gogs wasn’t actively maintaining his project for a bit of a time, so a small team forked Gogs and created Gitea, in order to keep the software up2date.

But why use Gitea, if Gitlab has all these cool features? Sometimes you don’t need a CI or a massive platform like Gitlab. If that is the case you can use Gitea which needs <50 MB memory and runs on nearly all machines perfectly, without any problem.

Gitea has everything you need for your git projects:

• Issue Tracking
• Wiki
• Code View

And if you need Continuous Integration? Then use DroneCI. It’s also written in Go, it’s bleeding fast and easy to use.

My Conclusion? I’m a fan of software which is powerful but kind of minimalistic, so I would definitely recommend using Gitea in combination with DroneCI over Gitlab.