Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub • Hacker News Board

epiccoleman wrote: post #28

I've been a Gitlab fan for a long time[0]. I typically default to GitHub for my repo slop[1], but if I'm doing something serious I put it in Gitlab. I like their CI setup better than GitHub and there's also self-host options if any of those "serious" projects ever needs that. Also back in the day, you needed a paid account to make private repos on GitHub, but Gitlab made them free. Anyway I haven't heard anyone compl…

Yes! And for those complaining that gitlab CE selfhosted is resource hungry: It can be tuned to only use 2 GB memory in total and run perfectly fine for a single developer or limited concurrency. Gitlab CI is awesome.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#34

Post by malindhamsara » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#35

Post by BaudouinVH » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

Ironically hosted on Github Gogs is a self-hosted forge : https://github.com/gogs/gogs

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#36

Post by beoutdoors » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

My org uses a self-hosted instance of RhodeCode Enterprise. It's not as feature rich as GitHub, but it's worked well for us.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#37

Post by plqbfbv » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 2:45 PM UTC

To all of those proposing self-hosted GitLab: we did it for 6+ years in my company, and it's not always a smooth sailing. We had our own runners and we made it auto-upgrade across docker images daily before business start. It mostly worked really well, except those few times were a Docker upgrade had to be rolled back, or that one time the bundled pg_shared_buffers was set at 1MB by default, making schema upgrades impossible for bigger instances, or a version major would break pipeline expectations forcing to upgrade 200+ repos at a time (we pinned to major afterwards). Lately I was also receiving an almost weekly "critical patch" newsletter due to critical/high vulnerabilities, which I can only imagine are due to LLM running over the code and identifying bugs.

That said, I wish we hadn't migrated to GH, our self-hosted instance had WAY less downtime despite being perhaps a bit slower (mgmt saving money) and required a bit more toil: GH is nowhere near Enterprise-ready and it feels a downgrade across the board. GL has better access granularity, better docs, better integrations, and you can clearly see the UI received a lot of attention (although it does take 10m with a new account to pin the proper items in the maze of sub-menus that is the sidebar). You can also look at the code and help out if needed, and/or simply provide a patched version to your image via a docker mount.

If you're really looking at self-hosting GitLab for a smallish team (up to 50-100 ppl), prepare at the very least a 16GB machine (best 32GB) with 4 cores and a decent SSD, and at least a small team (1-3 people) that can maintain it properly or jump at it at any moment. For runners, a small k3s cluster is ideal to make use of all the resources you can throw at it without worrying about managing the runner state/configuration.