Linux

Git is the underlying code management and version control system. It can be used directly, and also forms the backend to a number of other systems.

Code "forges" are platforms which integrate a version control system (like git), a code repository (a file server), and front end utilities.

Some git forges are open source, others are proprietary. Certainly with the open source ones, but also with the proprietary ones in some cases, you can either self-host or use a hosted service.

GitHub is a proprietary forge, and GitHub.com is the company's fully hosted service. They're now owned by Microsoft.

Gitlab is an open source forge. Gitlab.com offers a hosted service, but many projects self-host.

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea which is a fork of Gogs. These are all also open source. As far as I know, neither Forgejo nor Gogs offer a hosted version, but Gitea does.

A few other notable forges include GNU Savannah (open source), Bitbucket (proprietary), Sourceforge (proprietary), Launchpad (open source), Allura (open source).

At the end of the day, they all do the same thing. They have different feature lists (especially around some of the project management and user interaction side), different user interfaces (some are shinier and more modern, others more minimalist), and different communities and support models. You choose that one that works best for your needs.

GitHub is probably the most feature-rich (and/or bloated) of them. GitLab is competing in the same space, and self-hosted GitLab seems to be something of a sweet spot for many projects that want a premium experience without needing to use a proprietary Microsoft product. I don't have much experience with Forgejo or Gitea. The rest tend to exist in their niches.

Note that Git also isn’t the only distributed version control system (DVCS); there maybe be other alternatives out there for you not just in code forge but the system underneath it too.

For something super lightweight you can try https://pr.pico.sh/

Gitlab pipelines are super nice to use and integrate nicely with merge requests.

I like the Github UI, clean and simple, but down like what comes along with it…

Interested in self hosting forejo but I’m mostly coding at work these days.

GitHub is a company owned by Microsoft (in the USA). They allow you to host git repositories there (a git forge) and they use your code to train their AI.

GitLab is another git forge, you can also host your code there. I think it was also bought off.

Forgejo is git forge software. If you want to use a git forge that relies on Forgejo, checkout CodeBerg (based in Germany). Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, which is a fork of Gogs.

<rant> All of these tend to offer not only a git forge but also other crap like tickets and CI/CD in what i personally see as feature creep. </rant>

If you are a developer then no difference if you're a scrum master then you need to gtfo

Don't use github/gitlab for small private repositories! use codeberg.org if you are not a developer. If you are in need for a big more jazz and looking at self-hosting go for forgejo.

In my opinion Github in its current incarnation mainly exists to steal the IP of programmers and lock it up in proprietary AI services controlled by Microsoft. It dominates for the same reason Facebook or Youtube dominate. It is the only platform normies know and it benefits from massive network effects. It is US owned and operated which is becoming an issue for lots of people. Github is a proprietary closed source platform. I believe it was originally mostly written in Ruby but they have likely replaced all the performance bottlenecks using other languages. In my opinion their site is a usability nightmare.

Forejo is a fork of Gitea by Codeberg, a community run non-profit from Germany (still a liberal democracy under the rule of law) and hosted in Europe. They provide free hosting for open source projects or it is easy to self host. Gitea is a fork of Gogs and remains active. All those forks are written in the Go language and it requires a single exe, a config file and an sql database to run making it very easy to self host even without containers.

Gitlab is a service like Github or Codeberg that can also be self hosted but it is written in Ruby, a slow and inefficient interpreted language, which like Javascript or Python has lots of crazy fragile run time dependencies. The open source project was originally a work of Dutch and Ukrainian programmers and it was a Dutch company but they took VC money and IPOed and I don't know that I would assume it is European controlled. Some open source projects like Gnome moved there as it was the main alternative to Github. Can't recommend vs Gitea/Foejo for self hosting.

For single developers, small groups, arguably all you really need is git and email if you don't need or want all the extra fluff. That can work even for large projects like the Linux kernel. Sites like github tend to serve as single points of contact for lots of projects. It is their front page, issue tracker, everything which is one hell of a dependency on another company. It has Facebook-ized the code ecosystem. I think it also sort of serves as a linkedn for some people.

In the same order you asked:

Safe, easy to use, polished and reliable ; Someone else tried to emulate the first one success ; Poorly executed open-source alternative you can selfhost.

All of them speak the git and are essentially web UIs made to manage it and the creation of repositories and setting up permissions.

Forgejo. ♥

Github uses its own proprietary platform which it resells, Github Enterprise.

Gitlab uses a FOSS alternative engine, but IMO it's super heavy for 90% of use cases.

Forgejo checks all the right boxes. Lightweight. FOSS. Still not convinced? Check out Gitea.

Github: Microsoft code hosting site that feeds all your code through AI training and tries to lock you in through their pull request and related machinery. Once used a motto like "social coding", but let go of that when they realized Facebook for nerds didn't sound that great. Software is mostly proprietary besides Git itself.

Gitlab: 1) a Github competitor (gitlab.com, code hosting site with somewhat similar features; 2) the software for that site, huge and bloaty and slow, written with Ruby on Rails. You can self host it if you want, but yecch.

Forgejo: Git front end software, fork of Gitea and/or Gogs. Small and fast and written in Go. Fewer features than Github or Gitlab. If you want to self-host, I'd use this or some variant. Quite easy to install and run.

Gitweb: comes with git, pretty rudimentary but has old school attractiveness at least for me. Really just a browsing interface. No pull requests or anything like that.

Git, just plain Git: if you are self-hosting a project for yourself and maybe a few friends/collaborators, it's fine to just use git with no web stuff, and push/pull by ssh. You'd manually install account credentials for your friends. This is really the simplest, but NO fluffy UI or other creature comforts.

Fossil: amazingly small and fast alternative to all the above (fossil-scm.org) but uses its own VCS (Fossil) that doesn't interoperate with Git. I think the author said he might convert it over sometime. It's written in C! Uses sqlite as repo backend instead of the file system like git uses. Has built in wiki, bug tracking, documentation viewer, etc. and used about 2MB of ram last time I tried it, ridiculously small (Gogs used around 40MB and Gitlab uses gigabytes).

Sourceforge (sf.net), very old school code hosting site, not of much relevance any more. They released an old old version of the software a long time ago and that got forked to become Savannah.

Savannah (savannah.gnu.org) hosting site for GNU and related software. Also savannah.nongnu.org for non-GNU stuff in the same spirit. I don't know the exact criteria for putting stuff on nongnu but I think it's on a project-approval basis, rather than letting everyone upload whatever they want.

Darcs (darcs.net), another alternative to git, better in some ways, written in Haskell, lost most of its users after a self-inflicted footbullet around 5y ago. There was a hosting site (darcsweb?) for it but that looks to be gone now.

There are a few more of them too, none of much importance these days even though some were interesting.

Another "Differences in Linux" question :)

Dafuq does a comparison of git hosting services got to do with Linux?

All three are web based frontends for git repositories; you use git to send and receive code to/from them for storage and sharing. They all also provide other things useful to developers such as issue tracking, wikis and such. They are different products that fulfill the same role.

what software does github.com use?

It's all proprietary software (presumably) written in-house. We don't have access to it.

whats the difference between them (pros/cons)?

Github:
Pro: Wider reach, everyone knows about Github.
Con: Proprietary; your code is hosted based on the whims of Microsoft.

Forgejo:
Pro: Open source, selfhostable. There's a big instance on https://codeberg.org/ which a lot of open source projects are starting to move to.
Con: It's smaller and not as well known as Github. In theory it may also lack features, but I've not seen any that have gotten in my way.

Gitlab:
Pro: It's... I guess in second place in terms of popularity? It's also selfhostable.
Con: It's one of those open source projects with paid closed source features, so not really appealing to either group. It's also had questionable management decisions recently.

what about self-hosting? Possibilities/Preferences?

If you want to selfhost a git server, I'd recommend Forgejo; it seems to be the most friendly towards the open source and selfhosting communities.

Others are posting the well written explanations, so I’ll make the short comparisons.

GitHub is like Reddit is to Lemmy. It’s the main player in source code hosting, proprietary and centralized to the profits and whims of Microsoft. But for that cost, you can easily bet a project you are looking for has a presence there, and it’s easier for a dev to pop from project to project with one account and identity.

The others are like Lemmy, meant for hosting your own GitHub-like website with all the bells and whistles on top of the standard Git codeshare. There’s a lot of feature parity, though some softwares have more than others. But it comes at the cost of obscurity, Codeberg is a big player but any instance you find is isolated, and any devs you entice to help you need to register additional accounts personal to that instance. And the hosting costs are on you, it can all vanish with an unpaid domain/server bill unlike the central giant of GitHub.

Why is no one mentioning the Chinese open source one? Gitee? Genuinely asking.

Ha, I was thinking this is a perfect llm question so I tried. And I was right.

Great questions! Let's break down the differences between GitHub, GitLab, and Forgejo, and address your specific queries.

Overview

1. GitHub:

   • Company: GitHub, Inc. (owned by Microsoft since 2018).
   • Software: GitHub is a proprietary platform. The software running GitHub.com is not open-source.
   • Primary Use: Hosting Git repositories, collaboration, CI/CD, project management, and more.

2. GitLab:

   • Company: GitLab Inc.
   • Software: GitLab is an open-core platform, meaning the core functionality is open-source (GitLab Community Edition), but there are proprietary features in the Enterprise Edition.
   • Primary Use: Similar to GitHub, but with a stronger emphasis on CI/CD and DevOps.

3. Forgejo:

   • Software: Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, which is a lightweight, open-source Git service.
   • Primary Use: Self-hosted Git repository management with a focus on simplicity and community-driven development.

Detailed Differences

Software Used by GitHub

GitHub.com uses proprietary software developed by GitHub, Inc. The exact details of their software stack are not publicly available, but it is known to be highly customized and optimized for their scale.

Pros and Cons

GitHub:

• Pros:
  • Largest user base, making it the de facto standard for open-source projects.
  • Extensive integrations with third-party services.
  • Robust features for collaboration, including Issues, Pull Requests, and Actions (CI/CD).
• Cons:
  • Proprietary software, so you cannot self-host it.
  • Limited customization compared to open-source alternatives.

GitLab:

• Pros:
  • Open-source core (Community Edition).
  • Comprehensive DevOps lifecycle support, including CI/CD, monitoring, and security.
  • Can be self-hosted.
• Cons:
  • Can be resource-intensive to self-host.
  • Some advanced features are only available in the Enterprise Edition.

Forgejo:

• Pros:
  • Fully open-source and community-driven.
  • Lightweight and easy to self-host.
  • Simple and user-friendly interface.
• Cons:
  • Smaller ecosystem compared to GitHub and GitLab.
  • Fewer built-in features for CI/CD and DevOps.

Self-Hosting

GitHub:

• Self-Hosting: Not possible. GitHub is a cloud service only.

GitLab:

• Self-Hosting: Yes, GitLab offers both a cloud service (GitLab.com) and self-hosted options. You can download and install GitLab Community Edition or Enterprise Edition on your own infrastructure.

Forgejo:

• Self-Hosting: Yes, Forgejo is designed to be self-hosted. It is lightweight and can be run on modest hardware.

Preferences

• For Open-Source Projects: GitHub is often preferred due to its large community and visibility.
• For DevOps and CI/CD: GitLab is a strong choice due to its comprehensive feature set.
• For Lightweight Self-Hosting: Forgejo (or Gitea) is ideal if you need a simple, self-hosted Git service without the overhead of more complex platforms.

Conclusion

Each platform has its strengths and is suited to different use cases. GitHub is great for visibility and collaboration, GitLab excels in DevOps and CI/CD, and Forgejo is perfect for lightweight, self-hosted Git management. Your choice will depend on your specific needs, whether it's community size, feature set, or the ability to self-host.