Forgejo
Forgejo is a community driven self hosted lightweight software forge guaranteed to remain 100% free software with easy installation, low maintenance, and focus on federation and privacy.
About Forgejo
Forgejo is a self hosted software forge created in December 2022 as a community driven fork of Gitea, operating under the umbrella of Codeberg e.V., a democratic non profit organization based in Germany. The project was established when Gitea's domains and trademarks were transferred to a for profit company without community approval, prompting contributors to create an alternative that guarantees the software will always remain free and open source. Forgejo powers Codeberg.org and is developed exclusively using free software tools.
Forgejo focuses on security, scaling, federation, and privacy while maintaining ease of use and low resource requirements. The platform provides all the essential features for software development including Git repository hosting, code review, issue tracking, CI/CD through Forgejo Actions, and project management. As a hard fork since early 2024, Forgejo is charting its own course with community governance ensuring decisions are made in the public interest rather than for profit maximization. The project actively works on forge federation enabling decentralized collaboration across different instances.
Key Features
- Git Repository Hosting: Complete Git hosting with repository management, browsing, commit history, and collaboration tools in a lightweight package.
- Forgejo Actions: Built in CI/CD system compatible with GitHub Actions for automated testing, building, and deployment workflows.
- Code Review: Pull request workflows with inline commenting, review requests, and protected branches for quality control.
- Project Management: Issue tracking with labels, milestones, assignments, kanban boards, and time tracking for comprehensive project oversight.
- 100% Free Software Guarantee: Developed exclusively using free software tools and guaranteed to remain free and open source forever under community governance.
- Security Focus: Proactive security vulnerability identification and fixing with advance notice of security releases available to all users.
- Forge Federation: Active development toward decentralized collaboration enabling interoperability between different Forgejo and other federated instances.
- Easy Installation: Simple deployment with minimal maintenance requirements, suitable for self hosting on various platforms.
Pricing
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Free (Self Hosted): $0 Full featured Forgejo under free software license, unlimited users and repositories, Git hosting, code review, CI/CD, project management, community support.
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Codeberg Hosted: Free with donation option Hosted instance of Forgejo on Codeberg.org, free to use with optional donations to support the non profit infrastructure, same features as self hosted.
Use Cases
- Self hosted software forge for privacy and data sovereignty
- Community driven open source project hosting
- Organizations prioritizing free software principles
- Development teams seeking decentralized federation capabilities
- Migration from Gitea to a community governed alternative
- Education and research institutions requiring transparent governance
Pros & Cons
Pros:
- Guaranteed 100% free software with community governance
- Non profit organization ensuring public interest over profit
- Strong security focus with transparent vulnerability handling
- Active development on forge federation for decentralized collaboration
- Drop in replacement for Gitea with API compatibility
- Developed exclusively using free software tools
Cons:
- Newer project with smaller ecosystem than Gitea
- Hard fork means future divergence may affect compatibility
- Limited commercial support options compared to Gitea
- Federation features still in development
Integrations
Woodpecker CI, Drone CI, Kubernetes, Docker, Slack, Matrix, Webhooks, REST API, ActivityPub (federation in development), LDAP, OAuth
FAQ
Last edited
March 6, 2026 at 9:04 AM by Venkatraman C
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