GitLab vs Gitea

Often yes, if the team mainly needs Git hosting, code review, packages and CI, and does not need a single product covering security scanning, compliance reporting and planning in one place. Gitea describes itself as an all-in-one service combining Git hosting, code review, team collaboration, package management and CI/CD, and it supports more than 20 package registry types. The deciding factor is what you would otherwise build or buy alongside it. GitLab's Free tier covers a wide base of DevSecOps features, while its higher tiers add advanced CI/CD, security testing and compliance features. If your security scanning and compliance evidence must come from the same platform, confirm which of those features Gitea provides in your edition before you commit, and compare that against the tooling you would otherwise run.

In Gitea, SAML 2.0 service provider support, audit logging, IP allowlisting and mandatory two-factor authentication are listed as features of Gitea Enterprise from CommitGo, which is a paid commercial product on top of the MIT-licensed Gitea. In GitLab, the open-core split is different: the Community Edition is MIT licensed, while the files under the ee/ directory are proprietary and need a paid subscription. GitLab's pricing page lists Premium at 29 US dollars per user per month billed annually, and Ultimate is custom priced. Confirm with each vendor which identity and audit features your required tier includes, because the feature placement changes between editions and releases. Ask for the annual per-user cost, the number of users counted, and whether support and upgrades are included.

GitLab publishes reference architectures that start at 1,000 users and 20 API requests per second and go up to 50,000 users and 1,000 API requests per second. The documentation generally recommends a high availability strategy for 3,000 or more users, using Gitaly Cluster with Praefect, PostgreSQL with Patroni, Redis Sentinel and Consul. Those components add machines and operating effort, so a small team on a single node is a different case from a high availability build. GitLab also says stateful components such as PostgreSQL and Redis are not supported inside Kubernetes, so the Cloud Native Hybrid pattern places them on VMs or managed services. Gitea runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, including small systems such as a Raspberry Pi, and supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and MSSQL. Size each against your expected concurrency, CI load and storage, and check the current reference architecture page before sizing.

Gitea Actions is designed to be compatible with GitHub Actions, but compatibility is not the same as running every workflow unchanged. Workflows that depend on specific GitHub-hosted runner images, GitHub-only APIs, or marketplace actions that assume GitHub's environment may need edits. Test your heaviest pipelines on a staging instance with your actual runners before planning a cutover. GitLab CI/CD uses its own .gitlab-ci.yml pipeline syntax, so GitHub Actions workflows must be rewritten rather than copied. Gitea's runner model and your secrets, cache and artifact handling also need checking. Ask the vendor or your implementation partner for a compatibility test against a sample of your real workflows.

No duration is fixed by the product, so the answer depends on what you move. The main drivers are the number of repositories and the size of their history, how many CI pipelines must be rewritten, the amount of issue, merge request and wiki data that must map to Gitea's data model, the packages and container images that need re-pointing, and how many integrations, webhooks and access rules must be recreated. Identity integration and audit requirements also add work when they must be reproduced in the target. GitLab documents import and migration paths in its user documentation, and you should confirm which objects transfer and which must be rebuilt. Ask for a written inventory of repositories, pipelines, integrations and access rules, and a cutover plan with rollback steps before agreeing a timeline.

Many teams can run Gitea with an internal platform or DevOps engineer, since it installs on modest hardware and supports common databases. GitLab can also be run in-house, but it has more moving parts, including PostgreSQL, Redis, object storage, Gitaly and, at higher scale, high availability components. The skills needed are database administration, backup and restore, upgrade planning and runner operations. GitLab requires upgrades to pass through required upgrade stops, for example 19.2, 19.5, 19.8 and 19.11, so an upgrade calendar matters. Assess your team against those tasks, and decide whether you will also handle security hardening, patch cadence and evidence collection. Ask yourself who is on call for a failed upgrade.

DeployOpen plans, implements, customizes, integrates, hardens, backs up, upgrades, documents and supports self-hosted open-source platforms inside your own infrastructure. Most engagements are fixed-scope, with scope, deliverables and timelines agreed in writing before work starts, and ongoing support, upgrades and continuous testing are available as retainers. To scope the work, DeployOpen would need your current Git and CI inventory, your identity provider and audit requirements, your target hosting environment (cloud accounts, data centers or air-gapped networks), your backup and recovery expectations, and the people who will own the platform after handover. DeployOpen does not issue audit reports or certifications, so any compliance evidence still comes from your independent auditor.

A useful quote ties the price to a written scope. Ask for the list of deliverables, such as installation, identity integration, CI migration, backup and restore testing, hardening and documentation. Request the assumptions behind each item, including repository and pipeline counts, the number of users, the target environment and the upgrade plan. Ask which items are one-time and which recur as retainer support or upgrades. For GitLab, separate the subscription cost from the services cost, since the subscription tier is a vendor license decision and the implementation is a services decision. For Gitea Enterprise, ask CommitGo for its per-seat or per-deployment terms directly. Clarify acceptance criteria, the handover process and what happens if the scope changes. DeployOpen does not publish a price list, so a quote follows from the written scope.