
Gitlab is not the only GitHub alternative - marky_nolan
MovingToGitlab has become a buzzword after the Microsoft-GitHub deal announcement. Thanks to the Gitlab marketing team on playing the right game at the right time. The Gitlab imports are on the rise.<p>But, Gitlab is not the only good alternative to GitHub.<p>I know a few more alternatives like Bitbucket and Codegiant that are equally good and maybe even better in a few aspects.<p>If you know any good alternatives, do list them here. let&#x27;s not fall prey to the Gitlab marketing movement without proper evaluation.
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neandrake
If you've been keeping up with HN the past day or so there have been a bunch
of great discussion around alternatives

[1] Kallithea
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17246386](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17246386)

[2] Phabricator
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17245649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17245649)

[3] GitTorrent
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17234498](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17234498)

[4] GitHub Alternatives
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241487)

[5] Gitea
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17245246](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17245246)

[6] Pagure [https://pagure.io/pagure](https://pagure.io/pagure)

[7] ReviewBoard [https://www.reviewboard.org/](https://www.reviewboard.org/)

[8] GitBucket [https://gitbucket.github.io/](https://gitbucket.github.io/)

[9] Tuleap [https://www.tuleap.org/](https://www.tuleap.org/)

~~~
DarkStar851
I haven't seen it here, but don't forget Gogs! Written in Go, super
lightweight and pretty full-featured. [https://gogs.io/](https://gogs.io/)

~~~
catdog
Maybe because there is Gitea, a fork of Gogs which is AFAIK more active now.

------
erjjones
GitLab has taken a good amount of funding. Which means they will sell out
eventually and the ones concerned about big brother taking over will be right
back in this discussion again.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-
com](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com)

Some type of crowd funded federation needs to be created and owned by all of
us if we truly want out from under this type of concern.

~~~
addcn
I caution the community against optimizing for continuity when there are so
many other factors that come into play. Sure it sucks to change which tool you
rely on every few years but that’s bound to happen anyway for one reason or
another.

I mean it’s all Git so switching might take 20 mins a repo, but without some
of the great features the most modern (often well funded) companies offer you
might lose 10 mins or more a day.

It’s all up to you but I don’t value continuity as much I do productivity.

------
parvenu74
Likewise, Git isn't the only distributed source control solution... and
probably not even the best, as detailed here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17242015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17242015)

~~~
veddox
I still mourn the passing of Bazaar (Canonical's CVS, developed in tandem with
Git but abandoned some years back). It was a lot easier to learn and use than
Git and had a beautifully clean Python codebase. Unfortunately, it was also
slower than Git and not as powerful, and eventually just lost out in the
survival of the fittest...

Though having said that, it's still alive in the Ubuntu universe, and there's
a community effort underway to keep up maintenance and port it to Python3,
under the new name of Breezy.

~~~
stevekemp
Don't forget "darcs". That had a lot of promise, but suffered from at least
one exponential timing issue - where it would get into a state which took
"forever" to resolve.

------
mrunkel
I am a huge fan of Beanstalk.
[https://beanstalkapp.com/](https://beanstalkapp.com/)

Pricing is good, service is excellent, code reviews are really very nice. I
have found them excellent to work with.

They don't really do the pull request model (at least they didn't a year ago
when I switched companies), but work great for feature branches.

------
toasterlovin
The world has changed a lot since the 90s. Microsoft is a pretty developer-
centric company now. People should just chill out and see what happens.

~~~
itomato
...said the frog in the kettle.

~~~
toasterlovin
I don't get it. What is the downside to waiting to see what happens?

Surely people have local copies of their source code, right? I mean, you
basically have to. That's how git works. So the worst case scenario is that
Microsoft does something to piss people off and then they switch to another
provider. That makes the worst case scenario exactly the same as what people
are advocating doing now voluntarily. How, then, is it not more prudent to
wait and see what happens?

------
eb0la
IMHO it is not a good time to move out of Github right now. I think Microsoft
will offer a bundled developer ecosystem like Atlassian
(bitbucket/trello/jira/confluence/pipelines), Amazon
(Cloud9/Codecommit/codestar/chime).

I bet a bundle with something like skype / github / visual studio / linkedIn
Learning... will come soon.

~~~
protonimitate
Agreed.

Jumping ship is a knee jerk reaction to news that hasn't impacted the platform
at all yet.

I'm not against trying out other services and encouraging competition in this
space, but people are over-reacting just a bit to the news.

~~~
wastedhours
Exactly, and with the "moving to Gitlab" comments of the past few days, the
switching cost is (at present) still really low. Only once something changes
will the need to move increase (if it ever does).

That being said, I've only ever put my repositories on Gitlab because of the
free private ones, although the vast majority of libraries I used are on GH.

~~~
jredmond
I don't have any hard evidence, but I suspect that the people who have already
jumped ship from GH only did so with solo projects or with very small teams.
The switching cost for those people/teams is always going to be pretty low.

------
wow-bot
I've used Phabricator, BitBucket and GitLab and I still think GitLab suits me
best. Upvote for choices though

~~~
veddox
I think I would really enjoy working with GitLab, but a while ago I tried to
set up an instance on my own server and it was a real pain... Then, once I
finally got it running, it turned out to hog incredible amounts of resources
even when doing absolutely nothing. So I gave it the kick.

If I were the sysadmin for a large-ish organization and had a dedicated server
for nothing but code hosting, I would definitely go with them. But for my own
private purposes it wasn't the right choice.

------
anatolinicolae
There's an awesome list at [https://github.com/ianchanning/awesome-github-
alternatives](https://github.com/ianchanning/awesome-github-alternatives)

------
jonathan-kosgei
No one has mentioned gogs yet [https://gogs.io/](https://gogs.io/)

~~~
billman
Great product. We have been using it for years. I was expecting it to be first
in the list.

------
stvkoch
I don't found reason to think that github is different after the deal with
Microsoft. So for now I 'll keep trust in github... Otherwise I will use pre
concept

------
Tepix
If you want to host your own, you can use cgit
[https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/](https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/) and
gitolite
[https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite](https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite)

------
znpy
I remember I used to run Indefero for a short while. It was nice, although
it'd largely dead and buried now.

Sources seems to still be available though:
[https://github.com/avit/indefero](https://github.com/avit/indefero)

------
skadimoolam
I personally prefer BitBucket, the best part about them is that they offer,
unlimited private repos.

~~~
ShowMeUnicorns
Absolutely, plus I find their UI to be way more usable

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tangue
As a side discussion, it's a good time to push alternatives to git like fossil
or mercurial.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
Because...? As far as I can tell, they offer no significant technical
advantages over Git. And it doesn't make sense to leave Git just for the sake
of diversity, as it's just a tool, and the fact that most developer know its
basics is very useful - you don't lose much time dealing with version control
training for each new project.

------
smolder
[https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#project-
manag...](https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted#project-management)

I posted this before one of the GitHub acquisition threads.

------
DpdC
Codegiant I like me for small personal repositories without much importance,
like mine. Is it based on gitlab? Tell me more about them. It looks nicer than
gitlab.

------
IpV8
Bitbucket works but their web interface is slow as hell.

------
hungerstrike
The vast majority of comments that I’ve seen outside of HN have been pro
Microsoft.

I guess HN is a Microsoft-free “safezone” for SV bubblers.

------
jacksmith21006
Thing is ideally everyone will go to one place which appears to be GitLab.

