Gitea vs Gogs 2026: Which Lightweight Git Server Should You Run?

Gitea and Gogs are the two minimalist, Go-based self-hosted Git servers — both ship as a single binary, both run on tiny hardware, and they share a common ancestor, because Gitea began as a fork of Gogs.

The short answer for most new setups is Gitea: it has the same small footprint but far more features and a much more active community. Gogs still earns its place where absolute minimalism is the goal.

• Choose Gitea for active development, modern features (Actions CI/CD, package registry), and a large community — on hardware that’s still very modest.
• Choose Gogs if you want the absolute smallest, simplest Git server and don’t need CI/CD or packages.
• For most people deploying today, Gitea is the safer default; the resource saving from Gogs is small while the feature gap is large.

Gitea was forked from Gogs in 2016, when contributors wanted a faster pace of development than the original single-maintainer model allowed. Both are written in Go, both distribute as a self-contained binary, and both are released under the MIT license. That shared DNA is why they feel similar to install and run — and why the comparison comes down to how much each has grown since the split.

This is where the two have separated. Gitea has moved well ahead: it added Actions-based CI/CD, a built-in package registry, project boards, OAuth provider capabilities, and signed-commit verification, among others. Gogs has stayed close to its original scope — repositories, issues, pull requests, a wiki, webhooks, and Git access over SSH and HTTP — and notably has no built-in CI and is not an OAuth provider. If you need pipelines or package hosting, Gogs would require bolting on an external tool, while Gitea includes them.

Gitea is actively developed by a large community, with frequent releases. Gogs is still maintained — it continues to receive updates every few months — but development is slower and driven primarily by its creator. That difference matters most for security: a more active project tends to ship fixes faster. Gogs isn’t abandoned, but if steady, rapid maintenance is a priority, Gitea has the edge.

Both are famously light; either will run on a small server with only a few hundred megabytes of RAM, and both have been run on single-board computers and NAS devices. Gogs is marginally leaner at the extreme low end, which can matter on very constrained hardware. For almost everyone else, the footprint difference is too small to be the deciding factor — especially set against the feature gap.

Choose Gitea if you want active development and modern features on a small server — which describes most deployments. Choose Gogs if you want the absolute minimum: the simplest possible Git server, on the leanest possible footprint, with no need for CI/CD or packages. For the typical user, Gitea wins, because you get everything Gogs offers plus a great deal more, at nearly the same resource cost.

Both run happily on a small virtual private server — they’re among the lightest Git servers you can self-host. A VPS gives you full control over your repositories, root access to install either binary, and EU data-residency options. Contabo’s Core VPS line offers strong RAM-per-Euro value that suits these lightweight workloads well; even the smaller plans have ample headroom. For a step-by-step deployment, the linked Gitea Docker guide below covers the most common path.