Gitea vs GitLab: Which Self-Hosted Git Server in 2026?

If you're shopping for a self-hosted Git server in 2026, the choice usually comes down to two: Gitea or GitLab. They sound similar on a feature checklist. They are not the same animal at all.

I've run both in production for different teams, and I'm going to be real with you: pick the wrong one and you'll either burn cash on a 4 GB VM you didn't need, or hit a feature wall six months in and migrate everything anyway. Let's avoid both.

The 30-second orientation

That RAM column is doing real work in your wallet. More on that in the cost section.

Gitea: the featherweight that grew up

Gitea started as a Gogs fork in 2016 with one job: be a tiny, fast, GitHub-shaped Git server you could run on a Raspberry Pi. It still does that. A fresh install sips around 150 MB of RAM at idle and the SQLite-backed single binary boots in under a second.

What changed over the years: Gitea Actions arrived in v1.21 (a GitHub Actions-compatible runner), package registries landed for npm, Maven, Container, Helm and others, and the UI quietly got into the same neighborhood as GitHub's. For a 5-person team pushing Go and Node code all day, Gitea is genuinely all you need.

The killer feature most people miss: Gitea Actions runs the exact same workflow YAML you'd use on GitHub. That means your .github/workflows/ci.yml can move to .gitea/workflows/ci.yml with a path change and almost nothing else. Migration friction approaches zero.

GitLab CE: the everything-in-one-box

GitLab is a completely different beast. It's not just a Git server. It's a Git server plus CI/CD plus a container registry plus issue tracking plus a wiki plus security scanning plus a Kubernetes integration plus, well, you get the idea. The Community Edition is open source and free; the Enterprise tiers add seat-based pricing on top.

Run GitLab and you get all of that on day one. You also get a Ruby on Rails monolith that wants 4 GB of RAM minimum, plus Postgres, plus Redis, plus Gitaly, plus Sidekiq workers. The official Omnibus installer hides that complexity, but it's there.

GitLab makes sense when:

• You have 20+ developers and want CI, registry, and code review in one tool
• You've outgrown stitching together Gitea + Drone + Harbor + a separate tracker
• Compliance auditors want SOC 2-style features baked in

It does not make sense for a three-person side project. The RAM bill alone tells you that.

Real cost on Elestio

Same workload, two very different VM sizes. Approximate monthly costs for a small team:

That's roughly 3x the infra cost for GitLab. Worth it if you'll actually use the CI runners and container registry. Not worth it if you're using GitLab as a fancy git push target.

Migration paths nobody warns you about

A few things to know before you commit:

• GitHub to Gitea: built-in importer pulls issues, PRs, wiki, releases, and labels. Re-attribution of authors needs each user to log in at least once before their commits get linked.
• GitHub to GitLab: the importer works, but expect to manually re-create some webhooks and service integrations. Plan an afternoon.
• GitLab to Gitea: painful. There is no clean one-shot importer; you'll script the repo cloning yourself and re-create issues via API.

If you think you might leave GitLab someday, leaving early is cheaper than leaving late. The bigger your history grows in there, the harder it is to extract.

The honest decision tree

Stop here and pick one:

• You're a solo dev or a 2-10 person team. Gitea. Don't overthink it. Add Gitea Actions on the same VM if you want CI.
• You're 10-30 devs and want CI without wiring separate tools. Still Gitea, but on a bigger VM (4 vCPU, 8 GB). Actions runners scale horizontally.
• You're 30+ devs, regulated industry, or you genuinely need built-in DAST/SAST, container registry, and an opinionated everything-platform. GitLab CE. Budget for the bigger VM and the Postgres/Redis overhead.

The trap people fall into: defaulting to GitLab because it's the brand they know from CI tutorials, then paying for 4 GB of idle RAM forever. Don't do that. Match the tool to the team size.

Common gotchas

• Gitea behind a reverse proxy: set ROOT_URL correctly in app.ini or webhooks come back with wrong hostnames. This breaks more first-time setups than anything else.
• GitLab Omnibus on small VMs: you'll see OOM kills on Sidekiq under load. Bump RAM before bumping anything else; the Ruby workers are hungry.
• Gitea Actions runners: by default they share resources with the Gitea binary. For real CI loads, put runners on a separate VM and register them remotely.
• GitLab container registry storage: layers pile up fast. Schedule cleanup policies on day one or you'll wake up to a full disk in three months.

Deploy either one in one click

Elestio hosts managed versions of both:

• Gitea on Elestio
• GitLab on Elestio

You get automatic backups, TLS, updates, and 24/7 monitoring out of the box. Spin one up, kick the tires for an afternoon, and you'll know which one fits before your trial ends.

Thanks for reading ❤️

See you in the next one 👋