Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab

Posted Oct 9, 2025 19:44 UTC (Thu) by SLi (subscriber, #53131)
Parent article: Gccrs after libcore

> The gccrs developers think that the Forgejo experiment is a good one that will widen the access to the project for contributors. It brings together a lot of resources onto a single page and matches what developers are using more widely; it is also free software, unlike GitHub, which is ""proprietary and awful"".

How does forgejo compare to e.g. gitlab?

I've interacted with some projects hosted on gitlab. I can see some ways in which GitHub is less than ideal even besides it being proprietary. But I find it really awful to not have a code search, which apparntly gitlab does not have.

Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab

Posted Oct 9, 2025 19:57 UTC (Thu) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

If you want to get a feel for Forgejo, you could peruse some of the projects on Codeberg, which uses Forgejo under the hood.

Looking at, say, the Shepherd repository, it seems that Forgejo/Codeberg do have code search. Whether it compares well with GitHub I can't say for sure, I haven't used it extensively...

Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab

Posted Oct 9, 2025 22:48 UTC (Thu) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (4 responses)

> [code search] which apparntly gitlab does not have

Gitlab has code search, but you need to set up a whole elasticsearch cluster for it; not every project self-hosting Gitlab wants to do that.

Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab

Posted Oct 10, 2025 18:54 UTC (Fri) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link] (3 responses)

Interesting. Perhaps then it's just the freedesktop gitlab instance where they haven't set up code search? Or (wouldn't be the first time) I just haven't figured out how to use gitlab—at times I find it quite unintuitive.

Looking at e.g. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/ , I see only a "search by filename" (even when signed in, if that makes a difference), which is... not what I mean by code search.

Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab

Posted Oct 11, 2025 11:48 UTC (Sat) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (2 responses)

> Perhaps then it's just the freedesktop gitlab instance where they haven't set up code search?

GNOME, too, has not set up a search cluster. Again: it's not something people self-hosting GitLab necessarily want to spend time babysitting in their infrastructure.

Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab

Posted Oct 11, 2025 12:43 UTC (Sat) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link] (1 responses)

I can see that. It's just that as far as git web UIs go, I'm baffled because to me this is *the* central feature of a git web UI. I could imagine migrating a project from GitHub to a gitlab instance without search for ideological reasons, but I couldn't pretend it's it's not la downgrade like going from git to CVS.

Probably this is exacerbated by how I work on systems, not any single repository. A really common use case for me is to search a repository for a specific error message or function name. Having a project hosted on a searchless instance basically forces me to either rely on unofficial GitHub copies or to check out the repository locally, which is just a major hassle if the only thing you want is to understand the immediate condition that triggers some error message.

Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab

Posted Oct 12, 2025 1:17 UTC (Sun) by lanodan (subscriber, #169017) [Link]

When a local grep doesn't works I've been using https://codesearch.debian.net/ quite few times even though I barely use Debian myself.
And one of the things I really love about it is the ability to use a regex.

Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab

Posted Oct 10, 2025 2:27 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I've used Github a bunch. We use our own GitLab instance at $DAYJOB (I help maintain the CI configurations and machines backing it). I've also been contributing on Codeberg projects lately.

Forgejo feels like Github in terminology, UI, and such. GitLab definitely has its own separate feel from either. I don't like that Forgejo continued Github's conflation of the issue and PR ID domains[1]. GitLab's review workflow is far better than Github (discussions, resolutions, etc.), so it is unfortunate that Forgejo copied Github instead.

However, GitLab is a monster. We have a "wait 60 seconds for things to settle" in an end-to-end test script just because it can take that long for the services behind the scenes to actually be ready. Forgejo is a Golang binary and is said to be ready in seconds. GitLab is also open core and the company does seem quite…distracted by shinies compared to useful feature considerations. They've accepted my patches (and we need very few these days). Take that as you will.

[1] One can migrate to GitLab while preserving issue/PR IDs, but cannot go the other way as !1 != #1 on GitLab which cannot be represented on the other forges.

Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab

Posted Oct 10, 2025 9:19 UTC (Fri) by vasvir (subscriber, #92389) [Link]

I am using gitea. forgejo is a fork of gitea. So I am expecting similar issues and performance.

gitea feels snappy and has a code search.

I think is relatively safe to extrapolate the above statement to forgejo.