Open Source Bitbucket Alternatives

Gitea sets out to make self-hosting a complete software development service the least painful option on the table. One binary covers Git hosting, code management, code review, issue tracking, a project kanban, a wiki, team collaboration, a package registry and CI/CD that can reuse GitHub Actions workflows.

Because it is written in Go, it builds for every platform and architecture the Go toolchain supports, including Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Windows across x86, amd64, ARM, RISC-V 64 and PowerPC. An official container image covers Docker, Podman and similar runtimes.

Administration is deliberately split between two surfaces.

• Dynamic settings: options that change at runtime live in the admin panel of a running instance.
• Static settings: the rest sit in an app.ini file and take effect on restart.
• Official tooling: a Go SDK, a command line client named tea and an action runner are maintained alongside the server.
• Translations: strings are managed through Crowdin, and new languages are added on request.
• Security patches: release and change logs are keyword tagged so fixes are straightforward to locate.

After a build, one gitea web command starts the server, and the documentation site covers installation, administration, usage and development. A public demo, a limited free tier and a hosted cloud trial all exist for anyone who wants to try the software before committing hardware to it.

Gogs sets out to be a simple, stable and extensible self-hosted Git service that installs with as little pain as possible. Written in Go, it distributes as an independent binary for every platform Go supports, which covers Linux, macOS, Windows and ARM based systems.

Hardware expectations are unusually low. A Raspberry Pi or a five dollar cloud droplet is enough to get started, two CPU cores and 512MB of RAM form the baseline for teamwork, and memory use stays flat as a team grows so only CPU count needs to follow.

The feature set matches what most teams actually use a forge for.

• Repository access: SSH, HTTP and HTTPS, with deploy keys, Git hooks and Git LFS.
• Collaboration: issues, pull requests, wikis, protected branches and a web editor for quick file changes.
• Webhooks: repository and organization hooks including Slack, Discord and Dingtalk.
• Migration: import or mirror repositories with their wikis from other code hosts.
• Authentication: SMTP, LDAP, reverse proxy, GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise with two factor support.
• Rendering: Jupyter notebooks and PDFs display in the browser.

The database can be PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite3 or anything speaking one of those protocols, and HTML templates and static files are customizable. Localization covers more than 31 languages through Crowdin. Cloudron, YunoHost and alwaysdata offer packaged deployments, and an experimental API is documented for automation.

Harness Open Source puts source code hosting, automated pipelines, developer environments and artifact registries behind a single service you run yourself. The stack that normally needs a Git host, a CI provider and a registry vendor collapses into one container on one port.

It is the successor to Drone. Where Drone covered continuous integration alone, Harness adds repositories, Gitspaces and registries, and the Drone codebase stays available as a feature branch while pipeline parity is worked toward. The server is written in Go with a Node-built web interface, and pipelines execute inside Docker containers.

One docker run command brings the platform up on port 3000, and with it these pieces.

• Code hosting: repositories served by the same binary that serves the user interface.
• Pipelines: DevOps automation running in Docker, negotiating the API version with your daemon.
• Gitspaces: hosted development environments provisioned from inside the platform.
• Artifact registries: package storage with conformance tests included in the build targets.
• REST API: a generated swagger specification is served alongside the app, with personal access tokens issued from the CLI.

Mount a volume before you start, because the container holds both the database and the repositories and loses everything otherwise. Docker Desktop, Rancher Desktop, Colima and native Linux Docker all work, the middle two needing a socket symlink or an environment variable. Building from source needs Go 1.20 or higher, Node and protobuf.

GitLab manages Git repositories with fine-grained access controls and adds the machinery around them, merge requests for code review, continuous integration and delivery pipelines that build, test and deploy applications, and an issue tracker, issue board and wiki for every project. More than 100,000 organizations use it, most of them on servers they run themselves.

A note on where the code lives. This GitHub repository is a mirror, while all development takes place on GitLab.com. A separate read-only mirror carries the build without proprietary code, and neither mirror accepts issues or merge requests.

The project ships in editions with different terms attached.

• Community Edition: Available freely under the MIT Expat license.
• Enterprise Edition: Adds features aimed at organizations past a hundred users, with official support for subscribers.
• JiHu Edition: A variant tailored specifically for the Chinese market.
• Open core: Most code is MIT, while files under the ee directory are proprietary yet source available and open to contributions.
• Hosted: GitLab.com runs the same product as a service, with a free trial of the Ultimate tier.

Installation is recommended through Omnibus packages, a Debian or RPM download installed with the system package manager, which beats compiling from source. GitLab is a Ruby on Rails application running on Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, RHEL or OpenSUSE with Ruby 3.3, Git 2.33 or later, Redis 6 and PostgreSQL 16.5.