Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
One commenter shares six-plus years of self-hosting GitLab in their company. They ran their own runners and automated daily Docker image upgrades before business start. It mostly worked well, but a few incidents stood out: a Docker upgrade had to be rolled back, the bundled pg_shared_buffers was set to 1MB by default, making schema upgrades impossible for larger instances, and a major version once broke pipeline expectations, forcing upgrades across 200+ repos (after which they pinned to major versions). Recently they received almost weekly critical-patch newsletters, which they attribute to LLM-driven bug scanning of the code.
Despite those pain points, they say they wish they hadn't migrated to GitHub: their self-hosted instance had way less downtime, though it was a bit slower (management was saving money) and required more toil. They call GitHub "nowhere near Enterprise-ready" and a "downgrade across the board," while GitLab offers better access granularity, better docs, better integrations, and a UI that clearly received attention (though the sidebar takes about 10 minutes with a new account to pin the proper items). Since it's open source, you can also look at and patch the code via a Docker mount.
For smallish teams (up to 50-100 people) considering self-hosting GitLab, they recommend at least a 16GB machine (ideally 32GB), 4 cores, a decent SSD, and 1-3 people who can maintain it properly. For runners, a small k3s cluster is ideal for using resources without managing runner state/configuration.
The thread also surfaces other alternatives. The commenter recently moved to Gitoro for private projects, an EU-hosted option that is fast and has nothing to complain about so far. Another user points to Codeberg as the obvious open-source, community-owned, privacy-respecting, non-corporate alternative, noting it hooks directly into drone.io via SSO. Someone else says they self-host both on their internal network, describing Forgejo as technically an old version of Gitea (pre-fork).
The same user compares GitHub Actions to Forgejo actions, saying GitHub Actions "feels like someone's science project created while on a mushroom trip" and that you really just want something that executes a shell script in a runner. Forgejo actions were designed to be immediately understandable to GitHub Actions users; the user hasn't found differences enough to warrant complaint, though advanced use cases might be more frustrating. Their biggest complaint is that action logs aren't exposed over the... (the excerpt cuts off mid-sentence).