Best GitHub Alternatives in 2026: Hosted, Self-Hosted and GitHub Actions Options

The best GitHub alternatives are GitLab if you want an all-in-one DevOps platform, hosted or self-managed, Gitea if you want a lightweight forge on your own server, and Bitbucket if your planning lives in Jira. Azure DevOps suits Microsoft shops, and OneDev and Harness Open Source bundle Git hosting with built-in CI.

GitHub hosts repositories, pull requests, issues and its own CI service, GitHub Actions. This list starts with hosted platforms, then covers self-hosted forges, then forges that are not in the Enlisted catalogue yet, and ends with a section on replacing GitHub Actions. For a head-to-head on two of the big names, see Bitbucket vs GitHub.

A note on the table: GitLab appears twice in Enlisted. The hosted listing shows No under Self-host, but GitLab offers self-managed installs, which Enlisted tracks under its Community Edition listing.

Why people look for GitHub alternatives

GitHub is home to a large open-source community, and Enlisted lists a free plan alongside paid per-user tiers. People still look elsewhere for concrete reasons.

• Closed source, hosted by default. GitHub is proprietary. Its pricing page lists a self-hosted version, GitHub Enterprise Server, but as a separate offering with its own pricing.
• Per-user plans and metered CI. Team and Enterprise are billed per user, and Actions comes with a monthly allowance of minutes by plan. Teams that run a lot of builds look at self-hosted runners or other CI.
• A bundle you may not want. GitHub now packages Copilot, Codespaces, Advanced Security and more around the core. Some teams prefer a plain forge, others want a single DevSecOps platform with those parts built in.
• Data control and governance. Some organizations need code on their own hardware or with a non-profit host, and some projects prefer free-software-only infrastructure.
• A different workflow. Email-based patch review, Mercurial support or a terminal-only server are not what GitHub is built around.

How we picked

Each platform hosts Git repositories with code review, which is GitHub's core job. For open-source entries Enlisted looks at recent GitHub activity, licence, how easy it is to self-host and published pricing, and for hosted entries at the free plan and pricing model. The descriptions come from the catalogue and official docs. Read more on how Enlisted ranks tools.

1. GitLab: best all-in-one DevOps platform, hosted or self-managed

GitLab is a DevSecOps platform that puts Git repositories, CI/CD, agile planning and security scanning in one application. Where GitHub is a collection of products around a repository, GitLab presents one product, with merge requests, pipelines, issue boards and application security testing together.

It is available as GitLab.com, as a self-managed install and as a single-tenant Dedicated offering. Enlisted lists a free plan with a small per-group user limit, a per-user Premium tier billed annually and a quoted Ultimate tier. The Community Edition mirror describes an open-core model: most code is MIT-licensed, and the files in its ee directory are proprietary but source-available. Enlisted lists the licence field as Other, so read the licence files before you plan around it.

• Best for: teams that want repositories, CI/CD and security scanning in one tool they can run themselves.
• Watch out for: the free plan has user limits, and advanced features sit in paid tiers.

2. Bitbucket: best for teams that live in Jira

Bitbucket is Atlassian's Git hosting service with pull requests and built-in Pipelines CI/CD. Its edge over GitHub is the Jira link: commits, branches and pull requests can be traced back to the issues they implement.

Atlassian lists a free plan for small teams and paid plans billed per user, and Bitbucket Data Center is the self-managed edition. The full comparison is in Bitbucket vs GitHub, and you can browse the Bitbucket listing for more.

• Best for: teams that plan in Jira and want code, builds and issues from one vendor.
• Watch out for: it is closed source, and the Jira advantage fades if you do not use Jira.

3. Azure DevOps: best for Microsoft and Azure teams

Azure DevOps is Microsoft's suite of Azure Repos for Git, Azure Boards for work tracking, Azure Pipelines for CI/CD, Azure Test Plans and Azure Artifacts for package feeds. You can adopt the services together or one at a time, for example Pipelines alone with code hosted elsewhere, and Pipelines are configured with YAML or a visual editor.

It is offered as a hosted service and as a self-managed server. Enlisted's entry notes the vendor site could not be read when it was written, so confirm current plan limits on the Azure DevOps site.

• Best for: enterprises and Azure-centred teams that want planning and CI/CD under one Microsoft account.
• Watch out for: it is closed source, and it is a broader suite than a plain Git host, so a small team may use only part of it.

4. Gitea: best lightweight self-hosted forge

Gitea is a self-hosted software development service, written in Go, that combines Git hosting, code review, issue tracking, kanban boards, a wiki, a package registry and CI/CD in one lightweight server. It aims to be the easiest and least painful way to run your own code platform, and it is released under the MIT licence.

Its CI/CD system can reuse GitHub Actions workflows, which eases moving existing pipelines. Gitea runs on Linux, macOS, the BSDs and Windows, and Enlisted lists a free open-source edition plus a paid Enterprise plan with a trial.

• Best for: teams and homelabs that want a small, fast, self-hosted GitHub replacement.
• Watch out for: you run the server, backups and upgrades yourself, and the paid Enterprise plan is where vendor support sits.

5. OneDev: best self-hosted forge with CI/CD built in

OneDev is a self-hosted platform that gathers Git hosting, issues, pull requests, CI/CD, packages, a wiki and workspaces in one place, under the MIT licence. It adds language-aware code search, branch protection rules that can require reviews or CI verification, and a Renovate integration for dependency updates through pull requests.

The Community Edition is free, and the Enterprise Edition is paid with a free trial.

• Best for: teams that want code review, CI and issues in one self-hosted Java application.
• Watch out for: the Community Edition is free but the Enterprise Edition is a paid tier, so check which features you need before you plan on the free one.

6. Harness Open Source: best for teams moving from Drone CI

Harness Open Source is a developer platform, written in Go and licensed under Apache-2.0, that bundles source code hosting, CI/CD pipelines, hosted development environments called Gitspaces and artifact registries. It is presented as the next generation of Drone: Drone covered only continuous integration, while Harness adds code hosting and developer environments.

Enlisted lists a free plan for individual developers and small teams, with paid Essentials and Enterprise plans quoted through sales.

• Best for: Drone users and teams that want repositories, pipelines and registries in one open-source product.
• Watch out for: the maintainers describe eventual parity with Drone's pipeline features as a goal, so check that the features you rely on are covered.

7. GitBucket: best GitHub-compatible API on your own server

GitBucket is a self-hosted Git web platform written in Scala, with repositories, issues, pull requests, a wiki, LDAP integration and a plugin system. It aims for API compatibility with GitHub, which can help when existing tools expect GitHub's API. It is licensed under Apache-2.0.

• Best for: teams that want a simple GitHub-like server with plugins and LDAP.
• Watch out for: its listing does not mention a built-in CI service like the platforms above, so you may need a separate CI engine.

8. Gogs: best minimal single-binary Git service

Gogs is a lightweight, self-hosted Git service written in Go that ships as a single binary for Linux, macOS, Windows and ARM-based systems. It supports issues, pull requests, wikis, protected branches, webhooks, Git LFS and mirroring, and it is MIT-licensed.

It can run on very small machines, which makes it a long-standing choice for personal and small-team servers.

• Best for: small teams that want the least moving parts.
• Watch out for: it is more minimal than Gitea or GitLab, and its listing does not mention integrated CI/CD.

9. Soft Serve: best Git server for the terminal

Soft Serve is a self-hostable Git server aimed at people who live in the terminal, shipped as a single binary. You can browse repositories, files and commits through a text interface over SSH, and clone over SSH, HTTP or the Git protocol. Access control uses SSH public keys, collaborators and tokens, and Git LFS is supported. It is MIT-licensed.

• Best for: developers who want a private Git host with no web UI to maintain.
• Watch out for: its listing describes a terminal and SSH interface, not a web-based pull request and issue workflow, so it replaces GitHub's hosting but not necessarily its collaboration features.

Forgejo, Codeberg and SourceHut: not in the catalogue yet

Three well-known options are not listed on Enlisted yet, so they have no card here. Check each site for current details.

• Forgejo describes itself as a self-hosted, lightweight software forge and a self-hosted alternative to GitHub. It is backed by a community under Codeberg e.V., a non-profit, and states that it will always be free software.
• Codeberg is a non-profit Git hosting service for free and open-source projects, run by Codeberg e.V. in Berlin on Forgejo. It is free to use, limited to free and open-source software, and offers Pages and CI through Woodpecker.
• SourceHut hosts Git and Mercurial repositories with builds, mailing lists, patch review and issue tracking. It is built around email-based workflows and says it has no tracking or advertising.

GitHub Actions alternatives: CI/CD options

GitHub Actions is GitHub's built-in automation and CI/CD service, with workflows triggered by repository events. If CI is the reason you are leaving, you can also move only the pipelines, since most CI tools work with repositories hosted anywhere.

• Woodpecker CI: a lightweight, Apache-2.0 CI/CD engine that runs pipelines in containers, with SQLite by default. It is the main CI at Codeberg, and a natural pair for Gitea or Forgejo.
• Jenkins: a Java automation server, MIT-licensed, extended through plugins and run on your own servers.
• Buildkite: runs pipelines on build agents you host, with a hosted control plane and optional hosted compute. It has a free plan for small teams.
• CircleCI: a hosted CI/CD service with a free plan, integrations with GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, and an Orbs registry.
• TeamCity: JetBrains' CI/CD server with build chains, available self-hosted or as a cloud service.
• Concourse CI: an Apache-2.0 automation system with declarative pipelines and stateless workers.
• Dagger: an Apache-2.0 engine that runs the same pipeline locally, in CI or in the cloud, instead of tying it to one CI vendor's YAML.
• GitLab CI, Gitea and Harness: if you move your repositories, their built-in pipelines come with them. Act runs existing GitHub Actions workflows locally with Docker, which helps while you migrate.

Which GitHub alternative should you choose?

See every GitHub alternative in the catalogue, the GitLab alternatives page, or the wider DevOps category.

Self-hosting a Git forge: what to plan for

Most open-source options here are free to install and cost time to run. Plan for a server or container host, a database, regular backups, TLS and upgrades, and decide who is on call when it goes down. CI runners or agents are usually a second thing to install and maintain.

Migration is usually the easier half: Git itself moves cleanly, but issues, pull request history, secrets and CI configuration need separate attention. If you also use AI coding tools on your repositories, they work against local clones, so the host rarely matters; see Cursor alternatives and Claude Code alternatives. For deploying what you build, the Heroku alternatives guide covers platforms that deploy from a Git repository.