Frequently Asked Question

What's the difference between GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, and Sourcehut?

Git itself is just a command-line tool; these four are forges, web services built on top of Git that add issue tracking, pull/merge requests, code review, and CI. GitHub is the dominant commercial service, owned by Microsoft since 2018, and is where almost all major open-source projects host their development. GitLab is its main commercial competitor, also offers a free self-hosted Community Edition, and tends to be preferred inside enterprises for its built-in CI/CD pipelines and DevSecOps tooling.

Codeberg is a non-profit, EU-based forge run by a German registered association, powered by the open-source Forgejo project (a community fork of Gitea). It is attractive to developers who want their open-source work hosted somewhere that is not a US corporation and explicitly forbids using user code for AI training. Sourcehut is the contrarian choice: minimalist (no JavaScript required), email-driven (git send-email patches to mailing lists rather than pull requests), and provides CI across an unusually wide range of operating systems including BSDs. For self-hosting your own forge, Forgejo and Gitea are the lightweight options; GitLab CE is the heavyweight one.