Since silently launching in 2008, when computer network connections barely allowed streaming giants to swap order-by-mail films for a TV-over-Internet service, GitHub has provided and continues to provide immense benefits to programmers of just about any kind. We could say that the largest collaborative development platform functions like a gym, where the open-source culture grows stronger every day through its millions of users who share their projects and collaborate with others. And that’s some serious brawn 💪 we’re talking about.

However, like any (human) product, the platform has its limits, downsides, and critics. GitHub has been barred by certain governments, and even if that isn’t exactly the company’s fault, the users are the ones limited from pushing their code. Another criticism concerns the price tag: some users have pointed out that GitHub’s pricing model is too inflexible. Moreover, some devs spout about the slow operation of GitHub’s API.

The 10 Best Alternatives to GitHub in 2023

In any case, we’re not dunking on GitHub. On the contrary: We consider it a superb platform with a very helpful labelling system that allows newcomers to try their first programming strikes in productive environments. And while GitHub remains a brilliant platform for the programming world, we also need to acknowledge there are alternatives out there. That is why, in this blog, we will list 10 sites like GitHub in 2023.

1. GitLab

GitLab is a web-based DevSecOps (take that, Call of Duty) platform that allows software development teams to plan, build, and ship secure code all in one application. GitLab offers a range of features and tools to support the entire software development lifecycle, from project planning and source code management to continuous integration, delivery, and deployment.

Key benefits and singularities:

• Single application: GitLab brings all DevSecOps capabilities into one application with a unified data store, so everything is all in one place.
• Enhanced productivity: GitLab’s single application delivers a superior user experience, which improves cycle time and helps prevent context switching.
• Better automation: GitLab’s automation tools are more reliable and feature-rich, helping remove the cognitive load and unnecessary grunt work.

Site type: Self-hosted

Pricing:

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2. Bitbucket

Bitbucket is a Git-based code hosting and collaboration tool designed for teams. It offers unbeatable integrations with Jira and Trello, designed to bring the entire software team together to implement a project. Bitbucket provides a place where your team can collaborate on code from concept to cloud, create quality code through automated testing, and confidently deploy code.

Key benefits and singularities:

• Exceptional integration with Jira and Trello: Structure chaos and keep the entire software company up to date, from engineering to design. Access branches, build statuses, commits, and Jira issues or Trello card statuses. This is excellent for medium-sized businesses.
• Code collaboration from concept to cloud: Transition Jira issues based on the status of pull requests, create a merge process checklist with assigned approvers, and check for approved builds. Automatically build and test with integrated continuous delivery.
• Deploy with confidence: Keep track of your deployments, preview them, and promote them with confidence. Protect your code. You can rest easy knowing that your code is secure in the Cloud and implement checks to prevent problems before they occur.

Bitbucket offers several hosting options, including Cloud, Server, and Data Centre. Each option has its own unique features and benefits. For example, Bitbucket Cloud is hosted on Atlassian’s servers and accessed via a URL. It has an exclusive built-in CI/CD tool, Pipelines, that enables you to build, test, and deploy directly from Bitbucket.

Site type: Self-hosted

Pricing:

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3. OneDev

OneDev is a self-hosted Git server with built-in CI/CD and Kanban. It offers a range of features to support the entire software development lifecycle, including symbol navigation and code search, customisable issue fields and workflows, a visual editor for CI/CD pipelines, a service desk for customer support, and code annotation with static analysis results.

Key benefits and singularities:

• Out-of-the-box symbol search and navigation: Just push your code and you’ll be able to perform symbol search and navigation in any commit without any extra setup. You can also jump to symbol definitions in diffs while reviewing commits or pull requests.
• Code search with regular expressions: You can switch to any commit and search the code using regular expressions. OneDev indexes the code with Lucene incrementally under the hood. At search time, literal tri-grams in the regular expression are extracted for a coarse search, followed by an exact match in the result. This makes regex search blazing fast, even for large repositories like Linux.
• Annotate source/diff with static analysis results to facilitate code review: This can be done by many third-party applications on GitHub, but they display the results on their applications, making review activities such as adding comments over analysis results difficult. Not to mention that you need to pay for these services.
• Customisable issue state and field, with deep CI/CD integration: The simple open/close state of GitHub/GitLab issues does not work well for many workflows. With customisable issue states, you can address this issue with four states: open, committed, test-ready, and released.

OneDev is designed with performance in mind and can be used on a 2-core 2 GB box for medium-sized projects. It has been intensively used for more than 5 years, with battle-proven reliability.

Site type: Self-hosted

Pricing: Free

4. Gogs

Gogs is a self-hosted Git service that aims to be simple, stable, and extensible. Written in Go, it’s designed to be easy to install and set up and can run on a variety of platforms, including Linux, macOS, Windows, and ARM-based systems.

Key benefits and singularities:

• Easy to install: Gogs can be installed simply by running the binary for your platform. It can also be shipped with Docker or Vagrant, or packaged.
• Cross-platform: Gogs can run on any platform that Go — the programming language — can compile for, including Windows, Mac, Linux, ARM, etc.
• Lightweight: Gogs has low minimal requirements and can run on an inexpensive Raspberry Pi. Some users even run Gogs instances on their NAS devices, making it one of the few GitHub alternatives that can help you justify to your partner why you’re getting a NAS device apart from for pulling the latest episodes from your favourite anime show.
• Open Source: Gogs is 100% open source and free of charge. All source code is available under the MIT Licence on GitHub1.

In summary, Gogs is a self-hosted Git service that is easy to install and set up and offers a range of features to support software development teams.

Site type: Self-hosted

Pricing: Free

5. Codeberg

Codeberg is a democratic, community-driven, non-profit software development platform operated by Codeberg e.V. and centred around Codeberg.org; on their About Us page, they list briefly what they want and immediately start explaining how to migrate from Codeberg to any other site if you don’t like how it works. That kind of demeanour oozes transparency. 

On Codeberg, you can develop your own Free Software — they like calling it libre — projects, contribute to other projects, browse through inspiring and useful free software, share your knowledge or build your projects a home on the web using Codeberg Pages.

Key benefits and singularities:

• Community-driven: Codeberg is not a for-profit corporation but an open community of free software enthusiasts providing a humane, non-commercial and privacy-friendly alternative to commercial services such as GitHub.
• Non-profit: The mission of Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process.
• Independence: Dependencies on commercial, external, or proprietary services for the operation of the platform are avoided, to guarantee independence and reliability.

Site type: Self-hosted

Pricing: Free

6. Radicle

Radicle is a sovereign code infrastructure that enables developers to securely collaborate on software over a peer-to-peer network built on Git. It offers a range of features to support the entire software development lifecycle, including familiar workflows, self-sovereign identity, and verifiable authorship.

Key benefits and singularities:

• Sovereign code infrastructure: Radicle enables developers to securely collaborate on software over a peer-to-peer network built on Git.
• Familiar workflows: If you’ve used Git before, you’ll feel right at home. Push and pull from and to seed nodes with familiar commands like rad push and rad pull.
• Self-sovereign identity: Everything you do on Radicle is backed by public-key cryptography. Create your Radicle Identity with rad auth, and use it across the Radicle Network.
• Verifiable authorship: Whether user artefacts such as comments, issues, commits, and code reviews can have their authorship cryptographically verified by users.

Site type: Peer-to-peer

Pricing: Free

7. Gitea

Gitea is a painless self-hosted all-in-one software development service that includes Git hosting, code review, team collaboration, package registry, and CI/CD. It is similar to GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab. Gitea was forked from Gogs originally and almost all the code has been changed.

Key benefits and singularities:

• Easy to install: Gitea is designed to provide the easiest, fastest, and most painless way of setting up a self-hosted Git service.
• Cross-platform: With Go, Gitea can be done platform-independently across all platforms which Go supports, including Linux, macOS, and Windows, on x86, amd64, ARM and PowerPC architectures.
• Lightweight: Gitea has low minimal requirements and can run on an inexpensive Raspberry Pi.
• Open Source: Gitea is 100% open source and free of charge. All source code is available under the MIT Licence on GitHub.

Site type: Self-hosted

Pricing: Depends on the number of users

• 20 users: 380 USD per month
• 50 users: 950 USD per month
• 100 users: 1900 USD per month
• Click here to see more

8. Google Cloud Source Repositories

Google Cloud Source Repositories is a fully-featured, private Git repository service hosted on Google Cloud. It is tightly integrated with other Google Cloud tools, making it easy to automatically build, test, deploy, and debug code right out of the gate.

Key benefits and singularities:

• Integration with Google Cloud tools: Cloud Source Repositories is tightly integrated with other Google Cloud tools, making it easy to automatically build, test, deploy, and debug code right out of the gate.
• Semantic code search: It features an entirely new user interface and semantic code search capabilities. Cloud Source Repositories is powered by the same underlying code search infrastructure that Google engineers perform their code searches on every day. You get superfast results and save a lot of time finding that piece of code that you know you’ve seen before.
• Fully-managed private Git repositories: Cloud Source Repositories are fully-featured, private Git repositories hosted on Google Cloud.

Site type: Hosted

Pricing: Google Cloud Source Repositories offers free and paid pricing options. The free tier includes up to 5 project users, 50 GB of storage, and 50 GB of egress per month. If you need more than that, you can pay for additional users, storage, and egress at the following rates:

• Additional users: $1 per user per month
• Additional storage: $0.10 per GB per month
• Additional egress: $0.10 per GB per month

9. AWS CodeCommit

AWS CodeCommit is a fully managed source control service that hosts secure Git-based repositories. It makes it easy for teams to collaborate on code in a secure and highly scalable ecosystem. 

Key benefits and singularities:

• Secure and scalable: AWS CodeCommit is a secure, fully managed, and highly scalable service that hosts private Git repositories.
• Collaboration: It allows teams to collaborate on code, implement workflows that include code reviews and comments by default, and control who can modify specific branches.
• Integration with existing tools: You can continue to use your preferred development environment plugins, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) systems, and graphical clients.
• Custom notifications and scripts: You can receive Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) notifications about events that impact your repositories and send notifications to create HTTP webhooks.
• Large repository support: You can create up to 1,000 repositories by default and generate up to 25,000 additional repositories on demand. You can also store and version any type of file.

AWS CodeCommit eliminates the need for hosting, maintaining, backing up, and scaling your source control servers. It also allows you to customise access for each user to your repositories, with automatically encrypted files in transit. Additionally, it keeps your repositories highly available and accessible with a scalable, redundant, and durable architecture.

Site type: Hosted

Pricing: Pricing is based on the number of active users, storage, and Git requests.

• The first 5 active users are free per month with the AWS Free Tier.
• Additional charges may apply for overages, with additional storage charged at $0.06 per GB-month and $0.001 per Git request.

10. Launchpad (by Canonical)

Launchpad is a collaborative development platform primarily used for the Ubuntu operating system and other open-source projects. Created by Canonical Ltd., Launchpad offers services to make software development easier, including bug tracking, code reviews, and translations. We explicitly indicate this is the Canonical project because German software giant SAP has a tool with the same name.

Launchpad’s origins as Bazaar predate GitHub, so you can expect a very solid, very collaborative, and very community-driven tool. If it’s almost 20 years old and still running, it should be functional, right?

Key benefits and singularities:

• Ubuntu development: Launchpad is integral to the development of Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions. It helps streamline the process of tracking bugs, managing software packages, and collaborating with Ubuntu's vast community.
• Bug tracking: With its advanced bug tracking system, developers can track issues across multiple projects, ensuring they're addressed promptly.
• Code hosting and reviews: Launchpad provides a platform for hosting and reviewing code, fostering collaborative development across different projects.
• Translations: One of Launchpad's standout features is its robust translation system, allowing open-source projects to be translated into multiple languages by contributors worldwide.

Launchpad is the nerve centre for the continuous improvement of the Ubuntu operating system and related projects, and it serves as a shining example of Canonical's fidelity to open source. You might want to take part.

Site type: Cloud-Hosted

Pricing: Free for open-source projects.