Gitea vs Gitea Enterprise

The Enterprise features only close a real gap when the team has a control problem that free settings and process cannot solve. SAML 2.0 service provider support matters most when identity is centralized in a corporate directory and joiner-mover-leaver control must be enforced from one place, so that removing a person from the directory removes Gitea access too. Audit logging matters when someone must later show who changed repositories, permissions or organization settings and when. Organization-level branch protection inheritance matters when dozens of repositories must share the same review and merge rules and drift between them is itself a finding. IP allowlisting matters when access must be bound to known networks, and mandatory two-factor authentication matters when the organization wants that requirement enforced for every account rather than trusted to individual habit.

A small team with a handful of repositories can often meet these needs with free-edition settings, a documented account review, a short list of named administrators and a periodic export of repository and permission state. Confirm in the free edition's documentation which of these settings exist in your installed version before you rely on them, and test each one in a non-production instance. Be clear that controls are not the same as evidence: an auditor decides whether your mix of tooling and process is sufficient for a given assessment, and no feature in either edition certifies compliance on its own. Ask your assessor early which evidence they expect, such as an access review record or a change history export, and build that into the decision before you buy.

Where the gap matters, price the work as well as the license. Enterprise licensing is one cost, and the integration of SAML with your identity provider, the design of audit log retention and the review of branch protection across repositories are others. Ask CommitGo what support, upgrade and integration terms come with a subscription and how they are scoped, then compare that quote with the cost of a self-managed control set. If you need the controls but not the commercial support, weigh Forgejo's governance and release model and the paid tiers of GitLab as alternatives, and confirm each one's current feature set for your exact requirements.

If your shortlist includes Forgejo or GitLab, the decision turns on governance and CI model as much as on features. Forgejo is licensed GPL-3.0-or-later from v9.0 onward, with earlier versions under MIT, and Codeberg e.V. owns its domains while project governance stays independent, according to the Forgejo FAQ. Gitea, by contrast, is MIT licensed and its commercial edition is sold by CommitGo, Inc. Teams that require a community-governed project with a copyleft license will weigh Forgejo differently from teams that are comfortable with a single company steering the roadmap. Forgejo Actions is a built-in CI system designed to be familiar to GitHub Actions users, but it is not compatible with GitHub Actions, so existing workflow files will need rework on either Forgejo or Gitea, where Gitea Actions is designed to be compatible.

GitLab is a different category of product. GitLab Community Edition is MIT licensed, but files in the ee/ directory are proprietary and need a paid subscription, according to the GitLab LICENSE file. GitLab also releases a minor version monthly on the third Thursday and backports security fixes to the current and previous two releases, so your patching calendar must be sized for that cadence. Compare that with Gitea's own release line, which shipped v28.0.0 on September 29, 2026 and v28.1.0 on October 6, 2026. Before you assume parity, check which of your required controls sit in the paid tier: SAML, audit logging and IP allowlisting must be confirmed in each vendor's current documentation for the exact edition and version you plan to run, because packaging changes between releases.

Treat this comparison as a checklist exercise. Ask CommitGo, the Forgejo project and GitLab to map SAML service provider support, audit log scope and retention, and IP allowlisting to the specific settings you need, then run a proof of concept against your identity provider and network policy. Ask each vendor what changes when you upgrade and which features require a paid subscription on your own infrastructure. Governance and CI model differences will often matter more to your architecture team than the feature list, so record them alongside the feature results when you decide.

The license fee is the smallest part of the total cost for most teams, and it is the only line that differs by a meaningful amount between the two editions. Free Gitea carries no license cost, but the platform still needs a host or cloud account, a database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite or MSSQL, all supported according to the Gitea documentation), backup and restore testing, upgrade windows across the v1.27 and v28 release lines, and staff time for identity integration and day-two administration. Those costs are paid to your own team or to a services partner, they recur every year, and they grow with the number of repositories, runners, package registries and users. Gitea Enterprise adds a commercial license or subscription from CommitGo, Inc. on top of all of them. The Enterprise page describes SAML 2.0 service provider support, audit logging, organization-level branch protection inheritance, IP allowlisting, mandatory two-factor authentication and dependency scanning, but the supplied facts do not include Enterprise pricing, term length, renewal terms or whether seat counts apply.

Build a cost model in two columns before you compare numbers. In the Gitea column, list your own infrastructure, database, backup, monitoring and upgrade hours. In the Enterprise column, add the CommitGo subscription and any effort to configure SAML, audit log retention, inherited branch protection and IP allowlists in your environment. Ask CommitGo for a written quote that states the license basis, the support tier, what is included in each control, whether the price recurs annually, how renewals and true-ups work, and whether Gitea Cloud is priced separately from self-hosted installs. Then ask DeployOpen for a fixed-scope quote covering the work you would actually buy from us, such as planning, SAML and identity integration, migration from an existing forge, hardening, backup testing and documentation. DeployOpen does not publish a price list, and our quote follows from the written scope, so the scope document is what drives the number.

Two cost items are often missed. The first is switching cost: if you adopt Gitea Enterprise and later move to Forgejo or GitLab's paid tiers, you will need to migrate repositories, pipelines, permissions and audit history, so ask CommitGo what export formats and data portability it supports. The second is the cost of not having a control: if an auditor or security team requires a control that only Enterprise provides, the cheaper free build may need compensating work that recurs. Forgejo's FAQ shows it is GPL-3.0-or-later from v9.0 onward, which changes the licensing comparison but not the staff costs, so compare each option on the same scope. Confirm current pricing and terms directly with the vendor and your own environment before you decide.