Gitea vs GitLab
A source-aware comparison of pricing, documented capabilities and workflow fit.
Short answer
- Price: not directly comparable — Gitea is pricing not verified, GitLab is free tier available.
- How to start: Gitea is pricing not verified, GitLab is free tier available.
- Where they differ: on what we checked they match — both offer public api, open source / self-hostable and sso (saml).
These lines are generated from the pricing we track, not from a paid placement. How we score tools.
What Gitea is
Gitea is a lightweight, self-hostable Git service with issues, pull requests and CI, running comfortably on modest hardware.
What GitLab is
GitLab bundles source hosting, CI/CD, package registry and issue tracking into one application, and it can be self-hosted on your own servers. That single-application approach is the whole pitch: fewer integrations to maintain, one permission model, one place to look. Self-hosting also makes it the default answer where source code cannot leave the organisation. The cost of that breadth is weight — a self-managed instance is real infrastructure to run and upgrade.
Side by side
What GitLab is built to do
- One application
- Repositories, CI/CD, registry, issues and reviews share one permission model.
- Self-hosting
- Runs on your own infrastructure when source code cannot leave the organisation.
- Built-in CI/CD
- Pipelines live in the repository with no separate service to connect.
- Container registry
- Images build and store alongside the code that produced them.
Choose Gitea if
- Teams that want their own Git host without running GitLab.
Choose GitLab if
- Teams that want their repository, pipelines and issues in one system, especially where self-hosting is a requirement.
Evidence and freshness
Where a claim on this page comes from a vendor page, it is linked here.
Gitea
Open source, free — vendor page verified · reviewed 2026-09-03
Gitea: pros & cons
- Runs on very little hardware
- Familiar interface for GitHub users
- Open source with no seat limits
- Fewer features than GitHub or GitLab
- You handle backups and upgrades
- Smaller plugin ecosystem
GitLab: pros & cons
- CI/CD is built in rather than bolted on
- Can be self-hosted, which matters for regulated teams
- Generous free tier including private repositories
- The interface is heavy compared with focused tools
- Self-hosting is real operational work
- Feature breadth means a steeper learning curve
Our verdict on Gitea
The pragmatic self-hosted choice. GitLab does more; Gitea does enough with far less overhead.
Our verdict on GitLab
A reasonable default when you want one vendor for the whole software lifecycle. If you only need Git hosting and your CI already lives elsewhere, it is more than you need.