Gitea vs Forgejo: Choosing Between a Company and a Community
Compare Gitea and Forgejo based on governance, hardware requirements, and migration ease. While Gitea has 57,500 GitHub stars, Forgejo offers a community-governed alternative managed by Codeberg e.V.
The Governance Divide
The decision in October 2022 to transfer the Gitea domain and trademark to a for-profit entity led to the creation of Forgejo, a community-governed fork managed by the German non-profit association Codeberg e.V. This split occurred because many contributors wanted a git forge under non-profit governance instead of a single company. As of September 2026, Gitea maintains 57,500 stars on GitHub, while Forgejo shows 11,000 stars on its mirror repositories. Gitea remains a commercial entity under Gitea Ltd, which also sells Gitea Enterprise and Gitea Cloud. Forgejo development utilizes a maintainer council and an association board that make all decisions in public on Matrix and mailing lists. The 15.0 LTS branch has support through July 15, 2027. The go-gitea/gitea GitHub repository has roughly 57,500 stars as of late August 2026, making it one of the most popular Go projects on the platform.
Hardware and Resource Realities
The RAM gap dictates which VPS you buy. Both Gitea and Forgejo run as a single Go binary and use about 40 to 80 MB of RAM when idle. They run easily on a $6 monthly VPS or a Raspberry Pi. GitLab CE requires a massive investment because it needs 16 GB of RAM to run Ruby on Rails. GitLab also requires 8 vCPUs for comfort, while Gitea runs on a single CPU core with 512 MB of RAM.
| Spec | Gitea | Forgejo | GitLab CE |
|---|---|---|---|
| License | MIT | AGPL | MIT-style |
| Idle RAM | 40 – 80 MB | 40 – 80 MB | 4 – 16 GB |
| Primary Language | Go | Go | Ruby / Go |
| CI/CD | Gitea Actions | Forgejo Actions | GitLab CI |
I note two specific resource issues from the 2026 bug trackers. Gitea 1.23.7 and 1.24.6 experienced a memory spike in the Actions log viewer where a 60 MB log file caused the service to use 2 GB of RAM. Forgejo 7.0.4 also saw RAM usage climb to 17 GB when the chroma syntax-highlighting library allocated excessive memory to render a diff. GitLab CE is a different class of software because it includes a built-in container registry, package registry, and CI/CD engine. Gitea and Forgejo provide better performance on constrained hardware despite GitLab’s feature set. Gitea supports PostgreSQL 12+, MySQL 8.0+, MariaDB 10.4+, built-in SQLite, and MSSQL 2012 SP4+ for diverse deployment needs. It includes a built-in package registry for npm, Maven, NuGet, and PyPI. Forgejo development includes experimental ActivityPub federation work to let instances interact like Mastodon servers.
Moving Between Forges
You probably know that Git is distributed, but the forge is always someone’s server. If you decide to switch from Gitea to Forgejo, the process is a drop-in migration because they share the same data layout. You simply point the Forgejo image at your Gitea data directory and everything works. Forgejo provides GitHub Actions compatibility, which makes moving CI/CD workflows easy because most standard actions work without modification. The current Gitea 1.27.3 release, which arrived in August 2026, included security fixes for authentication and pull requests. You must manually recreate GitHub Secrets in Forgejo. You will also need to re-push package artifacts to the Forgejo package registry.
I recommend Forgejo for any new installation where you value community control. The current Forgejo 16.0.5 version includes new Actions APIs for workflows and artifacts. You should use a PostgreSQL database instead of SQLite if your team grows beyond 10 users. If you have a team of 40 engineers, you will save thousands of dollars by avoiding seat-based pricing and running Forgejo on a single VPS. Will the community-led model outpace the commercial one?
Technewsdaily
Senior tech writer covering AI, gadgets and cybersecurity. Breaking down the news that matters, every day.
