Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub • Hacker News Board

inanothertime wrote: post #84

plqbfbv wrote: post #37

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 im…

Setting up custom GitLab runners can be cumbersome in the beginning! We faced that multiple times with various customer projects for which we were using GitLab.com managed repos. That's why my colleague and I recently built a "GitLab Runners as a Service" [0] -- simply use your self-managed GitLab or GitLab.com account to login, adding pipeline runners is a 1-click operation! Under the hood we provision a Hetzner mac…

I find the gitlab runner registration process a lot simpler than the github process, and a lot more flexible when you are self hosting the gitlab instance. We used kubernetes runners for both, and gitlab was clearly better.

The worst part about the github runner setup is that there is no built in support for using your own cache if you are using github.com and want to run your own runners. In order to use your own cache store for your runner jobs, you have to patch the runner image because the cache location is hard coded. Gitlab lets you choose your cache location as a standard feature.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#145

Post by thewisenerd » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

maratc wrote: post #63

bdcravens wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic CI vendors like Semaphore, Circle, etc are options.

I feel like something is missing from your list of "classic CI vendors" but can't exactly jput my jfinger on jit.

are we referring to jenkins here perhaps?

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#146

Post by paulhebert » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

icy wrote: post #115

https://tangled.org ! Founder/CEO here. We're a new forge building things from the ground up, and are fully federated -- you can host your git repos on your own infra, along with the CI runners. We've also got a pretty neat set of features (if I may say so myself): stacked PRs, Nix-based CI (if you want it), and a fully open protocol ( https://atproto.com ) to for you and your agents. Happy to answer any questions.

This looks pretty cool. I like the idea of a federated option

What’s the monetization plan? My biggest concern would be using this and it losing support in a few years

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#147

Post by rhdunn » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

techknowlogick wrote: post #88

ukd1 wrote: post #43

I've used gitlab and gitea; gitea is faster, and easier to manage and does everything I actually need though, is less feature complete.

I'm one of the project leads of Gitea. I'd be interested in knowing which features you are missing from Gitea compared to Gitlab? We are doing some backlog grooming right now, and input is very appreciated:)

Two of the big issues I had were around the user/repository forced structure. That works to some extent when you have multiple users with a small number of repositories. But for my personal projects I wanted more control over the structure and grouping.

I worked around it to some extent by having an organisation per category, but that doesn't work at scale. For example, you can't group Text-to-Speech projects around the different libraries (coqui-ai, Qwen3, parler, etc.), or language tooling installation scripts by programming language. -- Those have a group/subgroup/repository style structure.

The other related feature is having organisation or group-level issues and corresponding tracking features.

Gitolite doesn't impose/enforce a structure on the user. GitWeb/CGit have a free-form category (e.g. "lang/python") that the project can be assigned to. That works, but I'd like it to support multiple tags/labels for that.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#148

Post by fortran77 » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

I loved the simplicity of Amazon CodeCommit. Unfortunately, Amazon decided to deprecate it, no new provisionion but existing accounts could remain. I'd love it if someone else offered a similar product.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#149

Post by whycombinetor » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

icy wrote: post #115

https://tangled.org ! Founder/CEO here. We're a new forge building things from the ground up, and are fully federated -- you can host your git repos on your own infra, along with the CI runners. We've also got a pretty neat set of features (if I may say so myself): stacked PRs, Nix-based CI (if you want it), and a fully open protocol ( https://atproto.com ) to for you and your agents. Happy to answer any questions.

What's the monetization pathway here? No private repositories (because everything is on ATProto) so near zero commercial use potential - CI is free, everything is free, no pricing page... Am I the product if I use this service?

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#150

Post by eximius » Mon, Aug 17, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

icy wrote: post #115

https://tangled.org ! Founder/CEO here. We're a new forge building things from the ground up, and are fully federated -- you can host your git repos on your own infra, along with the CI runners. We've also got a pretty neat set of features (if I may say so myself): stacked PRs, Nix-based CI (if you want it), and a fully open protocol ( https://atproto.com ) to for you and your agents. Happy to answer any questions.

I think the main thing I'm waiting for in the atproto space, for _most_ applications, is private data solutions. And the recent RFC on private data spaces (I forget the terminology) is a start, but has a ways to go.