Ask HN: What alternatives to GitHub are you using?

59 yakattak 74 8/12/2025, 1:59:34 PM

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of chatter about GitHub alternatives. I’m interested in looking into them as well but I was curious what everyone else’s experience was.

I’ve been looking at Codeberg but I’m really anxious to leave GitHub Actions behind and Codeberg’s replacement doesn’t seem ready yet.

Comments (74)

icy · 2h ago

https://tangled.sh is an atproto (same tech as Bluesky) git collaboration platform. https://blog.tangled.sh/intro

We have a more advanced PR flow (stacking, round-based reviews), jujutsu support and we just launched our new CI system. Come join! https://tangled.sh/signup. The goal is to be the new town square for collaborating with friends and open source communities.

It's built fully in the open (https://tangled.sh/@tangled.sh/core) and we have a neat little community built around it on our Discord https://chat.tangled.sh.

Last night was a ton of fun with the sudden influx of users thanks to the GitHub news. :)

abound · 2h ago

You piqued my interest with the mention of jujutsu support. I just read the post on using it for code review [1] for stacked PRs and was really impressed, awesome work!

I've never used Gerrit directly, but I'm guessing that Jujutsu's change IDs are like a native version of what Gerrit does there.

I regularly (attempt to) do stacked diffs on GitHub with jj, and even with a bunch of automations it's still a clunky, awkward experience.

[1] https://blog.tangled.sh/stacking

icy · 1h ago

Glad you liked it! Yes, jj's change IDs are very similar to Gerrit's, but instead of a commit trailer it's now a header in the commit object itself. For example:

    $ git cat-file commit caa00e20


    tree e8418bf7e7c626fdf5b1570e6efcddf1e1b0c923
    parent 1e3a841997f81c9b0ed21dc5a91e783fcf2f4ec7
    author Anirudh Oppiliappan <anirudh@tangled.sh> 1754996643 +0300
    committer Anirudh Oppiliappan <anirudh@tangled.sh> 1754996799 +0300
    change-id skwlyzyomnwqntksmoqkrllqlpsskztt

    xrpc/{errors,serviceauth}: split shared xrpc code to top-level package

    Signed-off-by: Anirudh Oppiliappan <anirudh@tangled.sh>

microflash · 1h ago

Looks very interesting. Just signed up.

A few things that would make me actually use it: - namespaces (aka, organizations in GitHub terminology) - private repos (I usually start with private repos and then make them public)

The interface is really friendly and I like how approachable it is. You should make dedicated docs site instead of throwing folks at a bunch of markdowns. Maybe create a “Pages” equivalent and demo it by building a docs site?

icy · 1h ago

Yeah, for now orgs/namespaces are their own accounts (even better if you have a dedicated domain for your org). Private repos aren't a thing just yet since we use AT Protocol, and all data on protocol is public -- for now. This will change soon.

Appreciate the feedback! A dedicated docs site is in the works (along side a pages offering!).

aranw · 2h ago

I'm really liking tangled.sh but I don't think it supports private repos seen as it's built on top of atproto

mozzius · 2h ago

this is the only one really gunning for the “hub” part of github, very exciting stuff

yjftsjthsd-h · 2h ago

> jujutsu support

What does that mean? Doesn't jj just use git as its backend?

icy · 2h ago

We support stacked pull requests tracked using jj's change-ids: https://blog.tangled.sh/stacking

icapybara · 2h ago

I like the design of your site. Loads very fast, looks clean.

cryo · 2h ago

Do I miss something? The site only shows a stream but nothing to describe or show the project.

icy · 2h ago

That's the global timeline. If you'd like to look at a demo repositoy https://tangled.sh/@tangled.sh/core is a good one (monorepo for Tangled).

cryo · 2h ago

Ah I see, thanks. I only clicked on the first link assuming this was the project page.

icy · 2h ago

Thanks! Excellent site-wide performance is something we aim for -- hence our stack of Go + htmx!

moksha256 · 2h ago

To me the biggest not-easily-replaceable value is the "Hub" part of GitHub. It's easy enough to stand up your own Gitea or Forgejo instance for mirroring personal Git repos, set up your own GitLab instance for more sophisticated collaboration and CI workflows, etc...but the discoverability GitHub provides in its current form, since the vast majority of repos are hosted there (or at least have some kind of mirror there) is unparalleled.

Fluorescence · 1h ago

For what specifically?

My top-of-funnel is not searching github but recommendations or searching technology/platform specific repositories e.g. for software it's flathub/f-droid and for rust its crates.io/libs.rs.

Where the code is hosted is in theory irrelevant... but I'm ashamed to say that when code turns out to be on gitlab my heart sinks. It's a bit of a red flag for e.g. no bug-tracking, no contributions, no maintenance, absent maintainer and unexpected licenses.

It's gross personal hypocrisy because I hate the absurdity of commercially owned FOSS collaboration and centralised git and happily self-host myself... but those not publishing code on github are awkward bastards :)

riidom · 2h ago

I'd like to see a federation of git-hosting instances, fediverse-style.

nerdypepper · 2h ago

there's https://forgefed.org/ defined by the creators of forgejo. there is no complete implementation of the spec. from the last forgejo changelog, the "star" action has been completely federated. federated PRs and issues are a long way away.

https://tangled.sh is the other contender in this space that I know of. uses atproto (same as bluesky) under the hood.

fundamentally activitypub is insufficient to define these kind of networks. you'd need to have some sort of object-capability representation. the creators of forgefed are also moving in this direction: https://codeberg.org/Playwright/playwright

mhitza · 2h ago

It's not only discoverability, but also the need for accounts.

At some point I made very tiny contributions to OSS projects that had their own Gitlab hosted instances.

Sure a password manager makes it tolerable, but what about having an anonymous way of opening up PRs (subject to owner moderation of course)?

Use the author name and email for a virtual identity and when the PR request is accepted (not merged) force an email address validation for the PRer so that comment interaction can happen via email.

freeopinion · 2h ago

Or...

Fork the original repo onto your forge. Your forge could be your own forgejo instance, your own GitLab instance, just a plain git repo, or even Github if you like it so much.

Then send a note to the original authors informing them of your fork and the patch you wrote. Request that they review your work and pull it into their repo if they approve of it.

You don't need an account on their forge and they don't need an account on your forge.

mhitza · 1h ago

For me that adds to many steps, and removes collaboration transparency.

Disregarding the fact that I would need to have a way to reliably find the contact information, the review process would probably take place outside the source code platform.

woodrowbarlow · 2h ago

it depends on which network effects you want to benefit from. if you want your project to have visibility or attract contributors, then yeah. (although, mirroring your project to github can still accomplish a lot of that.) but if you want to benefit from forge tooling, like the ecosystem of github actions, then there are pretty good efforts to match API compatibility -- e.g., the gitea action runner can work with most github actions.

echelon · 2h ago

It's 100% the network, not the tech.

You can have 1:1 parity with any company or product, but unless you have their word of mouth distribution and adoption, you will lose. Every time.

People in aggregate, as crowds, are relatively static and inflexible. Once they learn a fact once, it sticks. You cannot unteach that without lifting metaphorical mountains. The first mover with escape velocity wins.

The amount of energy needed to undo that is massive.

You'll have fringe 0.01%ers adopt some other tool, but they'll never carry enough gravitas to bring the entire network with them.

Anecdotal evidence:

- Github, Facebook, and Reddit have never been unseated

- Instagram has never been replaced, only supplemented

- Twitter/X has only lost steam due to extremely bad press, an unwanted name change, and a huge effort from Meta (which leveraged traffic and synergy from Instagram). And even then, it's still well within the public zeitgeist. Bluesky and Mastodon didn't even make dents.

- Google has never been displaced (granted, Google pays a lot of money to maintain defaults and maintain a web "pane of glass" monopoly, redefine the address bar as a search bar, etc.)

grim_io · 1h ago

All your examples have replaced some other service in the past.

Except GitHub, maybe.

Granted, the replaced services were nowhere near the popularity levels of the current ones, and have made horrible decision.

freeopinion · 1h ago

Why should Github, Facebook, Reddit, or anybody else be unseated.

Just because I use Codeberg doesn't mean Github should die. Just because I never ever visit Facebook doesn't mean you should stop using it.

Why can't we all just play nice?

dboreham · 2h ago

Host your projects in Gitea then configure mirroring to GitHub for discoverability.

freeopinion · 1h ago

Or submit your Gitea repo list to three or four search engines.

Catbert59 · 2h ago

Private stuff: gitea on a cheap VPS. Will most likly migrate for Forgejo in the future. That stuff runs on a toaster.

Public projects: Github. Having no problem with it. Also makes me happy poisoning LLMs with my shitty code.

lokimedes · 2h ago

I run Gitea on my old Synology NAS, fast as a devil, especially when compared to Gitlab.

benterix · 32m ago

Good old Gitlab. There is just one con: its requirements. All the rest basically guarantees that whatever feature you might need, it will be there.

ozornin · 2h ago

https://codeberg.org

yakattak · 49m ago

Do you use their actions at all?

whalesalad · 2h ago

can someone with lore knowledge share the deal between gitea, forgejo and codeberg

kbolino · 1h ago

It actually starts with Gogs.

Gogs is FOSS but basically BDFL. What does and does not make it into Gogs (it's still around) is ultimately decided by one person, and he's fairly conservative. Gogs is very fast but lacks a lot of features that would allow it to go head-to-head with GitHub or Gitlab.

So, Gitea was forked from Gogs to allow it to take a different direction, with a larger group of maintainers and more input from the user community.

There were two major attempts to have hosted Gitea. The first was Codeberg, a nonprofit based in the EU. The second is a business that took the name Gitea, is based in the US, and changed Gitea (the software) to the "open core, closed premium" model.

This change led to the creation of the Forgejo fork, which Codeberg adopted.

woodrowbarlow · 2h ago

gitea is the OG. forgejo is a fork, focused on lower resource needs (i think?). codeberg uses forgejo and adds static-site generation (like github pages) and CI/CD (via woodpecker).

bananapub · 2h ago

gogs existed, gitea forked from it, gitea made some corporate structure change some people didn't like, they forked forgejo, codeberg is a hosted instance of forgejo.

grayhatter · 1h ago

I'm using srctree https://srctree.gr.ht/repo/srctree

Hopefully you'll forgive me for shilling my own project. It's a source code sharing site with a few primary goals. First, don't break the back button. I started the project right around the time github broke too many critical features in short succession. The back button, the URL bar, and ctrl+f in the code view. I also want it to be easy to use as a federated collaboration tool. Ideally you'd start your own instance locally, get a familiar GitHub like interface for submitting patches anywhere, even by email. Or if you're hosting a project, you could have an always up instance that others could connect to.

The part I've been thinking about deeply the past few days is how to improve the discoverability of peer repos and forks. I want to create something github like in terms of collaboration, but also try to incorporate some of the best lessons from mailing list based repos where it's easy to grab and try patchsets (exposed as branches) from a 'fork' without losing the value of a cannon 'upstream' and without insisting that any specific upstream is where every single commit belongs.

The whole thing is written in zig without any dependencies other than git for some of the repo management features I haven't ported yet. (and for generating git blames) If you do use it, or notice any issues, or think it's missing features do let me know. I'm currently trying to decide which is the next most important thing to hack on :)

see also https://github.com/GrayHatter/srctree if you want to subscribe to updates (still a feature srctree lacks lol)

geor9e · 36m ago

All of my code is in a synology drive folder (think Dropbox, but hosted on a NAS) with continuous backup and local git in the folders. I'm the only person who works on it, so it's been fine.

abound · 2h ago

My general rule of thumb:

- GitHub for things I expect broad collaboration on

- SourceHut for things I just want to share (or expect contributions from a specific group that are comfortable with email git flows)

- Self-hosted for everything else. This used to be Gitea, but I've recently switched to charmbracelet/soft-serve, which fits my needs well (it's small and comparatively simple)

As other folks have noted, the social features of GitHub are hard to replicate elsewhere, but I've enjoyed SourceHut's stripped back approach.

synack · 2h ago

A directory called “git” with a bunch of bare repos accessed over ssh. You don’t need to make this complicated.

matths · 2h ago

but then you don't have the pull request feature, do you?

Aurornis · 42m ago

The anti-UI people want to use e-mail and command line tools.

It’s not a direct equivalent to pull requests because it lacks all of the easy history, inline commenting, comment status tracking, and ease of use, among other things.

synack · 2h ago

You push a branch and send an email.

sam_lowry_ · 1h ago

Someone even made a simple walkthrough: https://git-send-email.io/

dboreham · 2h ago

Software was developed before the pull request. Typically proposed diffs were emailed around. Presumably this is what the pull request is trying to emulate.

nik736 · 2h ago

Self hosted Gitea with Gitea Actions. Works like a charm for me and a team of 5.

AlphaGeekZulu · 1h ago

Self-hosted GitLab for proprietary customer projects that I don’t want in the cloud. I don’t trust GitHub’s privacy promises — if only because of the risk of my own misconfiguration. The GitLab server runs on Ubuntu Server on a NUC and is accessed via Tailscale by our very small team. No need to make it visible to the outside world.

Slow, simple, inexpensive, safe, and good enough.

smjburton · 2h ago

Self-hosted Forgejo with Forgejo Actions for CI/CD. Forgejo Actions uses a syntax similar to GitHub Actions, so it's easy to transition. For my projects, I haven't had any issues. I'd suggest setting up an instance and testing it out to see if works with your projects/workflow as a replacement for GitHub/GitHub Actions.

Sunspark · 2h ago

Just like bots trawl the web to train AIs with, why would using different code sites be any different? If it's visible, they will still show up and scarf down the code for training material..

So, given that this will happen everywhere, does it really make a difference what MS does?

0xbadcafebee · 2h ago

I don't know why nobody has yet said "GitLab", but it's easily the most feature-rich GitHub alternative (and self-hostable if you need that, but if you don't, why not let them pay the hosting bill for you).

cryo · 2h ago

For personal projects: GIT barebone repositories + Wireguard to access them from all my devices.

OSS work is mirrored to Codeberg and SourceHut. For actions I try to make sure that local builds, and cross compilation to Windows, macOS, armhf and arm64, is always working to not soley depend on Github Actions.

hahn-kev · 1h ago

Wireguard?

cryo · 1h ago

Yes I meant Wireguard, haha spend too much time working with Wireshark lately.

yodon · 2h ago

To the people who say "GitHub for public projects, gitea (or whatever) for private projects," can I ask why?

If you're using GitHub for your public projects, why not just use GitHub period? Genuine question here.

osmsucks · 2h ago

For personal projects, I'm hosting them on <https://git.disroot.org/>. It's backed by Forgejo, and for my simple needs it's plenty.

stefanka · 27m ago

Does this work for private/closed source project? Where are the servers located and how is it financed?

sprybear · 2h ago

Was on GitLab, then I lost my 2FA and recovery codes. Pro move.

Still browsing. https://radicle.xyz looking rad, though.

ac130kz · 1h ago

Gitlab is an easy way to scale things related to code. There's also this new thing Radicle.

digdugdirk · 1h ago

Is Fossil able to step into the limelight yet?

I've always been fascinated by it, but it seems to be completely out of the limelight.

kitd · 1h ago

You can run Fossil a a standalone server, yes.

https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/server/

doubled112 · 2h ago

I don't have any public repos, but for private repos, I started with Gogs on a server at home, migrated to Gitea, and finally migrated to Forgejo.

sevenseacat · 2h ago

I've wanted to build a decent one since before GitHub even existed. Maybe today's news will be the impetus I finally need to start it.

zabzonk · 2h ago

I loved Mercurial (still do), and despite all the bad news, Google Code. And despite even more bad-mouthing, BitBucket.

nerdypepper · 2h ago

the only thing I really miss from GitHub is the social bits. it's super easy to stand up cgit etc. but you miss out on actual collab features, discover etc.

I've moved the bulk of my repos from GitHub to cgit first, but now to https://tangled.sh.

bradley13 · 2h ago

Personally, GitLab. Really, though, use anything that is not part of the Microsoft behemoth.

GavCo · 2h ago

definitely the best alternative in terms of DX

busterarm · 2h ago

Sourcehut.

aspbee555 · 2h ago

I have been using local hosted gitea for years for all private projects

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Ask HN: What alternatives to GitHub are you using?

Comments (74)