What this comparison adds
The site's Gitea page lists Forgejo as an alternative; this page says where the two differ, on six criteria read from each project's own documentation, LICENSE file and announcements, including how to move from one to the other, and when each one fits. No other page on the site compares them.
The comparison
Each cell links to the page it was read from and shows the day it was read; a cell older than the refresh window is marked stale.
| Provider | Governance | License | Built-in CI | Releases and support | Moving between them | Hosted offering |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gitea | Open source with leadership and commercial support from CommitGo; TOC of 3 community-elected and 3 company-appointed members. | MIT license (Copyright The Gitea Authors and The Gogs Authors). | Gitea Actions is built in since 1.19; jobs run on Gitea Runner (hard fork of nektos/act); docs: similar and mostly compatible with GitHub Actions. | Aims for a major release every three months; the latest two major lines are supported. No LTS line is documented. | Not published: the Gitea upgrade docs describe no migration path from Forgejo to Gitea. | Gitea Cloud (cloud.gitea.com), managed single-tenant: list $19/user/month, $9.5 with discount; 30-day trial. gitea.com is free for open source. |
| Forgejo | Governance is defined collectively by its contributors; domains held by non-profit Codeberg e.V., governance independent of Codeberg's. | GPL v3+ for v9.0 and later; versions up to v8.0 were MIT. | Forgejo Actions is built in; jobs run on Forgejo Runner; designed to be familiar to GitHub Actions users, not compatible. | Stable release every quarter, supported 3 months plus 2 weeks; Q1 release is LTS with 15 months of critical and security fixes. | Upgrade from Gitea supported up to v1.22 included: first to Forgejo v10.0.x, then to any later Forgejo version. | No managed offering by the project: forgejo.org points to accounts on Codeberg (a separate non-profit) and other instances. No price. |
When to choose each
Reasoned from the cells above. Each fits a different situation; none is better in general.
- Choose Gitea
- Choose Gitea when you want an MIT-licensed forge with a vendor-run managed option (Gitea Cloud) and commercial support from CommitGo, CI documented as mostly compatible with GitHub Actions, and a planned major release about every three months.
- Choose Forgejo
- Choose Forgejo when you want a GPL v3+ forge whose governance is defined by its contributors, a quarterly release schedule with a yearly LTS line, or an upgrade path from an existing Gitea instance up to v1.22.
How to read the columns
- Governance
- Who develops the project and who decides its direction, as each project states it.
- License
- The license of the project, as its LICENSE file or official statement says.
- Built-in CI
- The CI system that ships with the forge, the runner it uses, and how close it is to GitHub Actions as documented.
- Releases and support
- How often versions are released and how long each is supported, including any long-term support line.
- Moving between them
- What each project documents about moving an existing installation from the other one.
- Hosted offering
- Whether a hosted version exists, who runs it, and its starting price as published.
Method
The tools and the criteria were chosen in a content decision (#2929, 18 Oct 2026): tools that do the same job, each with public documentation, compared on what a choice between them turns on.
Each cell was read by hand from the project's own documentation, repository or pricing page, and keeps that page and the day it was read. Where a project publishes nothing on a criterion, the cell says what it does instead and cites the page that was checked. A cell is stale 90 days after it was read.
The tools keep a fixed order and no column is a score. This page runs no benchmark and names no winner; ANAROQ is never one of the sides, and nobody pays for a place.
Limits
- Features change between releases: the cell's date says when it was true, and the project's page is authoritative.
- A few criteria, not every difference: the columns are what a choice usually turns on, not a full feature list.
- No benchmark: performance, resource use and reliability were not measured.
Use it on the site
Sources
Every page a cell was read from, with the day it was read.