Gitea vs Forgejo 2026: What’s the Difference and Which to Self-Host?

Gitea and Forgejo are two lightweight, self-hosted Git platforms that look almost identical — because one began as a fork of the other. Forgejo split from Gitea in late 2022 over how the project was governed, and the two have been diverging since. They remain highly compatible today, so the real choice is less about features and more about governance: a company-backed project versus a community-run one.

• Choose Gitea if you want the company-backed project with the broadest ecosystem and the most familiarity.
• Choose Forgejo if community, non-profit governance and a privacy-forward direction matter to you — or if you’re already using Codeberg, which runs on Forgejo.
• They’re close enough that most users could run either; pick on governance and values more than on a feature checklist.

Forgejo emerged in October 2022, after the Gitea project’s direction was handed to a commercial entity. A group of contributors, concerned about community control, forked the codebase under the umbrella of Codeberg e.V., a German non-profit, and named it Forgejo. It began as a close ‘soft fork’ that tracked Gitea closely, then in early 2024 became a hard fork — meaning its codebase is now free to diverge rather than mirror Gitea line for line. People genuinely want this backstory when choosing between the two, because it explains everything else about how they differ.

This is the real differentiator. Forgejo is governed by a community structure under a non-profit, with the explicit goal of keeping the project controlled by the people who use it. Gitea is backed by a company, which can mean faster commercial investment but also the corporate direction that prompted the fork in the first place. Both are open-source and free to self-host; if who steers the project matters to you, that’s the axis to decide on.

At the surface level the two are still very close — the interface is nearly identical and container images are largely interchangeable, so Forgejo can serve as a drop-in replacement for Gitea, with migration documented in both directions. Where they’ve diverged, Forgejo has pushed community-driven work such as ActivityPub-based federation and its own Actions runner ahead of Gitea. Treat the newer federation features as opt-in rather than a production default. For day-to-day Git hosting, you’d struggle to tell them apart.

Both projects ship regular releases and are actively maintained. Since the hard fork, Forgejo cherry-picks selectively from Gitea rather than tracking it automatically, and steers its own roadmap through community governance. Gitea continues its own active release cadence with broad adoption behind it. Neither is stagnant; they’re simply moving in directions set by different kinds of stewardship.

Choose Gitea if you want the company-backed project with a broad ecosystem and maximum familiarity. Choose Forgejo if you prefer community governance, align with Codeberg, or value a FOSS-first, privacy-forward direction. Because the two remain so compatible, you can also start on one and migrate later with relatively little friction — so this is a decision you can revisit rather than a one-way door.

Both run well on a modest virtual private server — they’re lightweight Go applications that don’t demand much RAM. A VPS gives you root access to install either, control over your repositories, and EU data-residency options. Contabo’s Core VPS line, with its strong RAM-per-Euro value, comfortably hosts either project. Because Forgejo is largely a drop-in for Gitea, the same setup approach applies to both; the linked Gitea Docker guide below works as a starting point for either.