GitLab – Self Hosted Github alternative
GitLab is the best Github alternative comparing the functionalities and features it boasts to provide. This is one of the closest GitHub alternative. Just few days before the GitHub announcement, Gnome moved to Gitlab from Github. GIMP is the latest captain in the GitLab ship. These Big Names moved to GitLab because of it’s opensource nature.
Migrate from GitHub to Gitlab
You can now move all of your existing GitHub Repositories to your GitLab account. Follow the official documentionation from this link.
Gitlab has hosted service package but many will find them as costly. You can check their site to get the idea of the pricing :
To make GitLab your self hosted github alternative you may use DigitalOcean Cloud and install Gitlab with single click. To install Gitlab on your self hosted cloud please follow install Gitlab in DigitalOcean Guide.
BitBucket – The Best Opensource Github alternative
BitBucket by Atlassian is one of the best opensource Github alternatives. If you have used one of the Atlassian program like Jira, HipChat and Confluence then you can integrate BitBucket with your project seemlessly. What if you are not using these tools by Atlassian? Then you can enjoy BitBucket Hosted version control & repository service free for up to 5 team members. BitBucket is known to be very popular as github enterprise alternative.
If you are open source enthusiast then BitBucket also has Community license for team having member more than 5.
Github, GitLab and Bitbucket Comparison
The following image shows the differences among Github, GitLab and Bitbucket
Gogs – Free alternative to github
Gogs can be used on your private server, it is fast, and gives good performance on server with less resources, i.e, Low Ram. Gogs is now maintained by a single developer and for forked repositories you can not make pull request between branches. Gogs works great with any environment. Gogs is 100% Opensource and a free Github Alternative. Just hover to their website and install it within 1 minute.
Gitea – painless self hosted GitHub alternative
Gitea is the community fork of the Gogs software. Gogs software is maintained by a single person and to overcome the single point of failure some opensource enthusiasts are working with Git with Tea fork as they say. Gitea is written with Go language. Gitea is self hosted, very light and has excellent performance. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux seamlessly. Git version control system is supported by Gitea. P.S. One fun fact, the Gitea codebase is hosted on Github by the way.
Gitbucket The open Source Github Fork / alternative
GitBucket is a Github clone that runs on Apache Tomcat. You can use it on your own server for free. This gives you unlimited private project on your own server as self hosted solution. GitBucket is very easy to install and it took me only few minutes to install on my DigitalOcean droplet. You may Like: Best CDN for WordPress – Make your website Blazing fast LastPass FREE vs PREMIUM A real Comparison TOP 5 Zbigz Alternative
SourceForge – Free Github alternative
SourceForge is also the top candidate as free and opensource Github alternative. SourceForge is very popular among Open Source developers and most of the opensource projects are hosted in SourceForge. Now to use SourceForge as open source code hoster you can use SourceForge Github migration tool.
RhodeCode – Another Open Source Github alternative
RhodeCode Enterprise Source Code Management is free, opensource and supports all 3 major version control system e.g. Git, Subversion and Mercurial. If you need isolated environment then you can install it on your own machine. Although it has a centralized control system but the documentation is hard to get and you may face issue during debugging. RhodeCode Community Edition is free and open source. On the other hand, RhodeCode Enterprise Edition is a paid tool with 30 day trial. Most of the developer will be satisfied with its community edition as not all developers need it’s paid code reveiw or JIRA, Jenkins, Bamboo, Slack integration for the matter. RhodeCode is the de-facto opensource GitHub Alternative.
Conslusion
To conclude the list of the best Github alternatives, we have tested each of these tools and found them attractive alternatives to Github. As GitHub is now under the Microsoft umbrella, developers are loosing their interest in Github and would like to migrate to opensource Github alternatives. So which one do you use apart from Github for your open source code hosting and why? Please use the comment section below.
