Why self-host git at all

The obvious reason is privacy: private repos on your own hardware, no third party with read access to your code, no dependency on a free-tier private-repo limit that could change. The less obvious reason is control over your own automation. If a scheduled job pushes commits and triggers a deploy, that whole pipeline runs faster and more reliably against a git server on the same local network than against an endpoint on the other side of the internet, and it keeps working even during a GitHub outage. It also gives you a real place to practice actual DevOps mechanics, CI runners, webhooks, branch protection, without any of it touching a public account.

Gitea: small, fast, and gets out of your way

Gitea is a single static Go binary with an embedded SQLite option (or Postgres/MySQL if you want a separate database), and it is genuinely light. It runs comfortably in a 1-2 vCPU, 1-2GB RAM container, the kind of footprint that barely registers next to everything else on a homelab host. Installation is a binary download, a systemd unit, and a config file, or a single container if you’d rather run it that way. It covers the features that actually matter day to day: repos, issues, pull requests, a wiki per repo, webhooks, and its own lightweight CI system (Gitea Actions, a GitHub Actions-compatible syntax) for anyone who wants pipelines without standing up a separate CI product.

The tradeoff is that Gitea is intentionally scoped smaller than GitLab. There’s no built-in container registry browser as polished as GitLab’s, no built-in Kubernetes integration, and project-management features (boards, milestones) are present but simpler. For a single operator or a small handful of collaborators hosting personal and homelab projects, none of that scope is missing, it’s scope you never needed.

Forgejo: the same core, a different governance story

Forgejo started as a hard fork of Gitea in 2022, prompted by community concerns after Gitea’s maintainers moved the project under a for-profit company (Gitea Limited) without broad community input into that decision. Functionally, Forgejo and Gitea remain very close, same core codebase lineage, same lightweight resource profile, same general feature set, and migrating between them is close to a non-event because the data formats stayed compatible for a long time after the fork. The real difference is who governs the project and where it’s headed: Forgejo is stewarded by a nonprofit-adjacent community structure (via Codeberg e.V.) with an explicit commitment to staying copyleft and community-governed, while Gitea proper is commercially backed and has since introduced enterprise-only features gated behind a paid tier.

For a homelab operator, this mostly matters as a values question rather than a technical one today. Forgejo has also started building things Gitea doesn’t have yet, most notably early federation support (letting Forgejo instances interact with each other, part of the same broader push as Lemmy and Mastodon toward federated infrastructure), which is a genuinely interesting direction if that appeals to you but isn’t something most single-operator setups will lean on. If you want the Gitea experience with a governance model you’re more comfortable with long-term, Forgejo is a drop-in choice. If you don’t have a strong opinion on that question, either one does the same job today.

GitLab CE: the full platform, at a real resource cost

GitLab Community Edition is a different scale of software entirely. It bundles source control with a full built-in CI/CD system, container registry, package registry, security scanning, and a genuinely deep project-management layer, epics, boards, time tracking, the kind of thing a mid-sized engineering org actually uses across a whole product. If your homelab project involves running your own CI runners for real build pipelines, publishing container images to your own registry, or you specifically want to learn GitLab because that’s what you use at work, GitLab CE is the only one of the three that does all of that natively without bolting on a separate product.

The cost is resource footprint. GitLab CE officially recommends a minimum of 4 vCPU and 8GB RAM for even a small single-user instance, and in practice it’s a genuinely heavy stack, Puma app servers, Sidekiq background workers, Redis, PostgreSQL, Gitaly, and more, all running as a bundled Omnibus install or a multi-container Docker Compose stack. That’s not a knock on the software, it’s an honest reflection of everything it’s actually doing, but it’s a real commitment on hardware that a Gitea or Forgejo instance simply isn’t. Upgrades also carry more weight, GitLab ships frequent releases and expects you to follow its supported upgrade path version by version rather than skipping ahead, which is manageable but is one more piece of ongoing maintenance than a Gitea binary swap.

Comparing the practical dimensions

Resource footprint: Gitea and Forgejo run fine in 1-2GB RAM and a couple of vCPUs. GitLab CE wants 8GB+ and genuinely benefits from more. If your Proxmox box is already tight on headroom, this alone decides it.

Built-in CI/CD: Gitea Actions and Forgejo Actions both exist and are GitHub Actions-syntax compatible, functional for straightforward build-test-deploy pipelines. GitLab’s CI/CD is more mature, more configurable, and has a much larger ecosystem of examples and integrations, at the cost of a steeper learning curve.

Container/package registry: GitLab’s is built-in and full-featured out of the box. Gitea and Forgejo both have a container registry now too, and it works, but it’s a smaller feature with less tooling built around it.

Project management depth: GitLab wins clearly if you want boards, epics, and milestone tracking across multiple projects. Gitea and Forgejo cover issues, labels, and basic milestones, enough for a solo operator or a small group, thinner if you’re trying to run something that looks like a real product roadmap.

Governance and long-term direction: Gitea is commercially backed with a widening gap between free and enterprise features. Forgejo is community/nonprofit-governed and committed to staying fully open. GitLab CE is the free tier of a company whose actual business is the paid Ultimate tier, CE stays genuinely open source but new capability tends to land in the paid editions first.

Picking one for your homelab

If you just want a private place for your own repos, homelab configs, and personal projects, with minimal resource cost: Gitea or Forgejo. Either one installs in ten minutes, runs happily on modest hardware, and does everything a single operator actually needs day to day. Pick Forgejo if the governance/copyleft angle matters to you, pick Gitea if you don’t have a preference either way or want the marginally larger plugin/theme ecosystem that’s built up around it over a longer history.

If you’re specifically building real CI/CD pipelines with container image publishing, or you want hands-on practice with the same platform your employer runs: GitLab CE, on hardware that can actually carry it. Don’t try to squeeze it onto a 2GB LXC and then blame the software when it’s slow.

If you’re not sure yet: start with Gitea or Forgejo. The barrier to trying either is a single small container and an afternoon, and if you outgrow it later, migrating repos out to GitLab (or anywhere else) is a standard git remote change, not a rebuild. Reaching for the heaviest tool before you know you need its features is the more common homelab mistake here, not the reverse.

Bottom line

There isn’t a wrong answer among these three so much as a mismatch risk: running GitLab CE for a single-user repo host wastes RAM you could give to something else, and trying to run real CI/CD and a container registry off Gitea or Forgejo alone will eventually feel like you’re fighting the tool. Match the platform to what you’re actually going to do with it, not to whichever name is most familiar, and any of the three will happily outlive whatever you throw at it.