Comparison

Gitea vs GitHub

Gitea lands on Depends, and GitHub lands on Worth it.

Gitea

Depends

Confidence: Medium

Buy if your team wants a free, self-hosted GitHub-style forge and can run and patch a server yourself.

Worth it

Confidence: High

Buy if your team writes code . it is the industry default with a genuinely free tier.

Gitea versus GitHub
Compare	Gitea	GitHub
Verdict	Depends	Worth it
Best for	Self-hosting dev teams	Software teams of any size
Who it's not for	Teams wanting zero-maintenance managed hosting	Non-technical teams that never touch code
Privacy	No known public vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed; vendor states all CVEs are fixed in the latest stable release.^⁶	Strong built-in security tooling, but a May 2026 breach via a malicious VS Code extension and earlier incidents are documented.¹⁵
Support quality	No support evidence in sources	No support-quality evidence in sources
Public sentiment	No independent user reviews found; all quotes in sources are vendor marketing copy.^¹	Users treat GitHub as the developer standard, but many beginners find Git confusing and Copilot's new usage-based pricing is widely unpopular.^⁹
Biggest gotcha	2022 governance split: company formed, Codeberg forked to Forgejo; fork risk persists^²	Copilot AI credits are usage-based; users report surprise bills and lock-in. Model costs before enabling org-wide.