Code, Control, and Cup Noodles: GitHub vs GitLab vs Gitea for the Home-Lab Hero

There’s an old joke in software development:

There are two kinds of developers—those who push to main, and those who push to GitHub.

Version control is the bedrock of modern software development, and in 2025, the options are plentiful. GitHub is the social network for developers. GitLab is the enterprise DevOps Swiss Army knife. And Gitea? Gitea is that self-hosted, open-source, lean-and-mean machine your Raspberry Pi secretly dreams about at night.

If you're a professional developer moonlighting as a homelab tinkerer, or an automation-obsessed hobbyist who thinks YAML is a love language, this article’s for you.

Let’s peel back the layers, look under the hood, and talk about why Gitea might be the version control platform you never knew you needed—until now.

🏢 GitHub: The Centralized Cathedral of Open Source

Let’s start with the obvious monolith.

GitHub is the de facto platform for open-source collaboration. It’s where code lives, dies, and is reborn in the glorious afterlife of forks and pull requests. Backed by Microsoft since 2018, GitHub has invested heavily in features like:

• GitHub Actions – CI/CD pipelines that feel more like scripting a heist than writing a Jenkinsfile.
• Copilot – An AI pair programmer that completes your code like it’s reading your mind (and your stack overflow history).
• Security Scanning – Dependency alerts, secret scanning, and code scanning baked in.

But GitHub has some caveats:

• Vendor Lock-In – While GitHub uses Git under the hood, their platform features (Actions, Issues, Discussions) are proprietary and don’t travel with your repo.
• Limited Self-Hosting – GitHub Enterprise Server exists, but it’s overkill for most homelab setups, and licensing is, let’s say, not priced for weekend projects.
• Cloud Reliance – Want to tinker offline, or in a fully air-gapped environment? GitHub says: Nope.

🧰 GitLab: The DevOps Megastructure

Then there’s GitLab. Not to be confused with GitHub (despite thousands of engineers typing gitlab.com into browser bars out of muscle memory).

GitLab is built around the DevOps lifecycle. You get version control, CI/CD, security scanning, issue tracking, container registries, and even Kubernetes integration—all in one monolithic app. GitLab CE (Community Edition) is open-source and self-hostable.

✅ Pros:

• Everything-in-One – You can go from idea to production without leaving GitLab.
• Powerful CI/CD – GitLab CI is deeply integrated, powerful, and declarative.
• Self-Hosting Friendly (ish) – GitLab CE is fully featured and free.

❌ Cons:

• Resource Intensive – Even the CE edition eats RAM for breakfast. You’ll need at least 4GB of RAM and CPU headroom to run it smoothly.
• Upgrades Can Be Tricky – It’s a big app. Major version upgrades are a thing.
• Overkill for Hobby Projects – Do you really need enterprise-grade DevSecOps just to track your Arduino weather station?

🏡 Gitea: The Lightweight Champion of the Homelab

Now let’s talk about the unsung hero of git hosting: Gitea.

Gitea is a self-hosted Git service that’s fast, lightweight, and easy to deploy. It’s written in Go, meaning a single static binary can run the whole application. Think of it as the Alpine Linux of Git platforms.

✅ Why Gitea Rocks:

• Tiny Footprint – Can run comfortably on a Raspberry Pi, a VPS, or that 2012 ThinkPad you repurposed as a server.
• Self-Contained – No external services required. Gitea can serve Git, a web UI, issue tracking, wikis, and even package registries.
• Easy Upgrades – Drop in a new binary and restart. That’s it. No 18-step database migrations.
• Low Maintenance – Designed to be simple. No Kubernetes. No Postgres optimization guides. Just run it.

💡 Cool Features for Homelab Heroes:

• Built-In CI (ActRunner) – Gitea now supports GitHub Actions-compatible workflows via Gitea Actions.
• Forge-Federation (Coming Soon) – The Fediverse is coming to source code. Think ActivityPub for Git platforms.
• Fine-Grained Access Control – Want to host your dotfiles, your kid’s Minecraft mods, and your company’s demo project all on one box with different access levels? Done.
• Dark Mode – It even has a decent dark theme. Because obviously.

⚠️ Caveats and Considerations:

• Community Over Enterprise – Gitea isn’t trying to eat GitHub’s lunch. You won’t find 20-person SRE teams writing Terraform modules for it.
• Fewer Integrations – No marketplace of Actions like GitHub. But you can roll your own with webhooks, runners, or just a bash script.
• UI Polish – Gitea is good. But it’s not GitHub-slick. Think “functional minimalism,” not “design awards.”

📦 Use Case Comparison

🚀 Why I Recommend Gitea for Home-Labbers

If you’re building your own infrastructure at home—whether it’s to learn, to tinker, or just to reduce your digital dependencies—Gitea strikes the perfect balance. It’s light, elegant, and gets out of your way. Spin it up with Docker Compose. Back it up with rsync or restic. Expose it securely with NGINX and Cloudflare Tunnel.

You're in control of your data. Your repositories are on your hardware. And if you ever want to tear it all down and start fresh, Gitea won’t fight you. It’s not a platform. It’s a tool. A damn good one.

🏁 Final Verdict

If GitHub is the flashy coworking space in Silicon Valley, and GitLab is the glass-and-steel enterprise skyscraper, Gitea is the cozy log cabin with solar panels, fiber internet, and a well-stocked fridge. It’s not about buzzwords. It’s about simplicity, ownership, and control.

For homelab heroes and tinkerers who want to run their own code forge without turning it into a full-time job, Gitea isn’t just good. It’s ideal.

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