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Development
Project Management
Developer Tools
Hosting
Git
Software Development
Version control
Source Code
What are the best alternatives to SourceForge?
13
Options
Considered
163
User
Recs.
Feb 1, 2024
Last
Updated
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11
Options
Considered
Best alternatives to SourceForge
Price
Git
SVN
89
GitLab
Free / Paid
Yes
No
73
Bitbucket
Free / Paid
Yes
No
71
GitHub
-
Yes
Yes (Limited)
--
Gogs
Free
Yes
No
--
Codeberg
Free
Yes
No
See Full List
89
GitLab
My Rec
ommendation
for
GitLab
My Recommendation for
GitLab
All
25
Pros
21
Cons
3
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Free private repositories
Private repositories are free and not limited in number. Unlike Bitbucket, it also allows an unlimited number of private collaborators.
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Top
Con
•••
The main instance (gitlab.com) uses the proprietary version
See More
Specs
Git:
Yes
SVN:
No
Mercurial:
No
Platforms:
Linux
See All Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Online editing with preview
Files can be edited directly on the web UI without downloading the repository. This is extremely fast and helpful for quick, small edits.
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Top
Con
•••
New features are (in most cases) unstable
Gitlab releases new features quite often (and that's a great thing), but more often than not, the new functionality has a lot of bugs.
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Top
Pro
•••
Integrated issue tracking
GitLab has an integrated issue tracker out of the box. Creating issues, commenting on them, it's all there out of the box.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Search functionality is not that refined
While you can search for users or projects, you cannot search for a filename. This makes GitLab's search one of the weak points in an otherwise great tool
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Top
Pro
•••
Modular control over permissions
With GitLab, you are able to lock branch pushing down to specific groups and users.
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Top
Pro
•••
Supports Approvers/Reviewers of Pull/Merge requests
Since 7.12 you can define a minimum number of approvers for merge requests.
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Top
Pro
•••
Can provide a Docker registry
The default docker.io registry is the docker hub but you can also login to other docker registries. And GitLab provides one for all Repos that make use of this feature.
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Top
Pro
•••
Free and open source
GitLab is a free and open source project licensed under MIT. Source code for Enterprise Edition can be found here and Community Edition here.
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Top
Pro
•••
Static site hosting with GitLab Pages
With GitLab Pages you can host for free your static websites on GitLab. Combined with the power of GitLab CI and the help of GitLab Runner you can deploy static pages for your individual projects, your user or your group.
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Top
Pro
•••
There are public instances of the community edition (Free/Libre/Open)
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Top
Pro
•••
Integrates fully with LDAP
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is an application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. GitLab EE adds additional functionality over CE such as support for multiple LDAP servers and group sync.
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Top
Pro
•••
Git LFS support
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Very feature rich RESTful-API
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Top
Pro
•••
"Snippets" support
Snippets are similar to (well-known) GitHub "gists". They are a way to share code or have conversations about anything without needing a full git repo. The implementation here reminds more of a sort of pastebin.
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Top
Pro
•••
Comes with integrated CI/CD solution
GitLab CI makes it easy to set up CI and deployment for projects in GitLab. It supports parallel testing, multiple platforms, Docker containers and streaming build logs.
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Top
Pro
•••
Permissions and roles are supported
It has private/public repositories, roles for users (master, developer, reporter, guest). All of these can be set from the user interface. Same permissions set for the UI work for the SSH as well.
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Top
Pro
•••
Issue tracking support
Has issue tracking out of the box. Creating tickets, commenting on issues, closing issues etc... It's all there out of the box.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Has wiki's and pages
Wiki and pages support out of the box.
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Top
Pro
•••
Supports pull requests
Has pull request (AKA, merge request) support.
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Top
Pro
•••
Regular updates
GitLab is being constantly worked on and has a new release every month on the 22nd. Updating is also very easy through a single apt-get command.
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Top
Pro
•••
Good web UI
GitLab's UI is clean and intuitive. Each view is designed to not fill the screen with useless information. It displays the activity in a feed-type way in the most prominent part of the view. On top of that, there's a toolbar with buttons which can filter this feed by pushes, merge events or comments. On the left, there's a menu that displays all the links that take you to the different views. For example, a file directory which displays all the files in that repo, a commit view which displays all the commits in cronological order, a network and a graph view that display important information graphically etc... All these details make GitLab's UI extremely intuitive and easy to use, no view is overflown with information and every view displays only the most useful and crucial information needed at that time.
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Top
Pro
•••
At feature parity with GitHub
Gitlab is very close to Github in use and feel, written in Ruby on Rails, open source and hosted on Github as well as on GitLab.com
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Free / Paid
Recommend
38
2
73
Bitbucket
My Rec
ommendation
for
Bitbucket
My Recommendation for
Bitbucket
All
13
Pros
9
Cons
3
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Unlimited private repos on free plan
For teams of up to 5 users private repositories are free.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Proprietary
See More
Specs
Git:
Yes
SVN:
No
Mercurial:
Yes
Top
Pro
•••
Mercurial and Git support
Supports both Mercurial and Git
See More
Top
Con
•••
The UI seems old and not very polished
While GitHub's UI is extremely simple to understand and very polished, BitBucket lacks a bit on this category. With a design that seems old and not as pleasant to look at.
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Top
Pro
•••
Issue tracking out of the box
BitBucket comes with an integrated issue/tickets management system.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Missing the ability to search in source code
Does not have support for searching in the source code.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Provides hosting and support for static pages
BitBucket, just like GitHub supports uploading and hosting static HTML pages for it's users.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
JIRA integration
BitBucket and JIRA come from the same team, so it's a given that JIRA would integrate so well with BitBucket.
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Top
Pro
•••
Backed by a trustable and great company
BitBucket is developed and maintained by Atlassian, which is not an unknown venture, especially for developers. Atlassian has a great number of other products used by million of users worldwide, including JIRA, HipChat, Confluence and Stash. All of them loved by the notoriously picky developer community, which means that Atlassian has gained a great deal of goodwill from their users.
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Top
Pro
•••
Native application for both Mac and Windows
Atlassian, the company behind BitBucket is also behind SourceTree, a free application for Windows and Mac wich works as a client for both Git and Mercurial which can be connected to BitBucket and other code hosting services.
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Top
Pro
•••
Free unlimited private repositories for students
Bitbucket offers free unlimited public and private repositories for academic users and teams as long as they have a .edu email.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Multiple authentication methods
BitBucket supports GitHub, Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, Google and even GitHub authentication.
See More
Hide
See All
Free / Paid
Recommend
25
2
71
GitHub
My Rec
ommendation
for
GitHub
My Recommendation for
GitHub
All
26
Pros
12
Cons
13
Specs
Top
Con
•••
Private repositories are available only for paying customers
This feature currently costs $7 a month.
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Top
Pro
•••
Feels and acts like a "social network for coders"
GitHub sometimes acts also as a social network for coders. It has different features that allow users to follow or star their favorite projects. The user's account page is like a Facebook wall with projects, pull requests, forks, pushes and merges all displayed. The main dashboard after logging in also displays news from followed developers or projects.
See More
Specs
Git:
Yes
SVN:
Yes (Limited)
Mercurial:
No
Top
Con
•••
Proprietary
The whole source code is not available to users in Free/Libre/Open license.
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Top
Pro
•••
Integrated issue tracking
GitHub has integrated issue tracking that make hunting and solving bugs easy. Each project's issues page can be filtered by closed issues, assignees, labels and milestones. Issues are also sortable by age, number of comments and update time.
See More
Top
Con
•••
It can be difficult to migrate away from due to it's central position in the ecosystem
Due to the fact that it's proprietary and that many external services integrate only with GitHub, it's becoming harder and harder to migrate a project away from it. That will be a big issue the day the company will make controversial choices (like SourceForge)
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Top
Pro
•••
Complete Git support
GitHub has full Git support.
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Top
Con
•••
Owned by Microsoft
See More
Top
Pro
•••
GitHub makes it easy to find open source projects
GitHub is the largest host in the world for open source projects. Developers from all over the world fork and work on countless projects hoset on it. For this, GitHub has some excellent features that help both new and experienced devs to find and commit to open source projects of any kind.
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Top
Con
•••
Using it encourages other tools to integrate only with GitHub, leading to a monopoly
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Top
Pro
•••
Anyone can fork
Any user can fork a project and submit a pull request. If accepted by the owner, the fork will be merged with the master branch. Forking in GitHub also is very easy, it's really just a two-click process.
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Top
Con
•••
GitHub is known for deleting files they don't like despite not breaking the sites TOS
GitHub has in the past removed content from their site that is not breaking their TOS. Examples such as the E Plus Equality project as well as the operation disrespectful nod repository have been removed despite not breaking any site rules and appear to have been done out of employee distaste. Considering the amount of content allowed on the site that is full of rude or vulgar humor, to single out these projects for removal shows employee politics and agendas take the front seat over an open and tolerant environment. Which is quite contradictory to open source ideals.
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Top
Pro
•••
Excellent native apps
GitHub has native apps for mobile (iOS and Android), Windows and Mac, which make code deployment easier and faster.
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Top
Con
•••
Only public repositories are free
Unfortunately, GitHub offers closed repositories only for premium users, and the price is not cheap at all.
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Top
Pro
•••
Supports Two-Factor authentication
GitHub has added another layer of security to their user accounts. This layer comes in the form of Two-Factor authentication. After it's enabled, GitHub delivers an authentication code by SMS, or by a free application for smartphones. After two-factor authentication is enabled, the authentication code is sent to the account owner's phone any time someone attempts to sign into their GitHub account. This means that only someone who has both the password and authentication code can sign into the account.
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Top
Con
•••
Very inconvenient UI
Very hard to switch between projects.
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Top
Pro
•••
Large community
GitHub is the largest code host on the planet with over 21.4 million hosted repositories and many users. It's unarguably the largest VCS used by developers worldwide and as such, it has a vibrant community that follows it resulting in many guides and tutorials for new users. Even experienced developers can always find an answer to any question they may have.
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Top
Con
•••
No OAuth2 support
In order to sign in to GitHub, users have to sign up first with unique credentials for GitHub only, so no option to sign in with Google+ or Facebook.
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Top
Pro
•••
Provides free hosting for static websites
GitHub Pages is a feature that allows developers to create websites for their projects or anything they need a static website for, for free.
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Top
Con
•••
Steals and sells your privacy
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Nice and usable UI
GitHub's UI is clean and intuitive. Each view is designed to not fill the screen with useless information. For example, the repository view displays only the most crucial data about that repo - on the top it displays the number of commits, branches, releases and contributors. When clicked, each of them will take the user to a page that displays more detailed information.
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Top
Con
•••
GitHub enforces their employees' politics on projects
GitHub employees are allowed to enforce their personal political beliefs on projects, regardless of the ToS in force at the time. The project that had been deleted was deleted with no warning and no ToS violations.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Project management tools
Support for projects, milestones, and wikis.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Limited web browser support
Modern web browsers like Waterfox are no longer supported, breaking basic UI elements and making the site unusable.
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Top
Pro
•••
SVN support
GitHub emulates a bridge on top of git repos, therefore every git repository hosted on GItHub can be accessed with a svn client without losing any features.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Rule of thumb: 1GB per repository, 100MB per file
For most repositories this is acceptable, but for already large repositories with a long history, this may be a limiting factor.
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Get it
here
Recommend
40
8
--
Gogs
My Rec
ommendation
for
Gogs
My Recommendation for
Gogs
All
11
Pros
7
Cons
3
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Free/Libre/Open source
Distributed under the MIT license.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Can't filter by a user to see all their commits in one place
I want to see a single user's entire history, but clicking a user's name only shows all users' history, not just the one I clicked.
See More
Specs
Git:
Yes
SVN:
No
Mercurial:
No
Platforms:
Windows, Linux, Mac
See All Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Self hostable
See More
Top
Con
•••
Supports only git
Gogs supports only the Git management system.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Huge community support
With over 11000 stars at github it is a very active project.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Can not make pull requests between branches of forked repositories
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Very light
Gogs is very light and has very low minimal requirements.
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Top
Pro
•••
Simple installation
The installation process is very simple, just a binary file that needs to be run on the directory where the user wants to install Gogs.
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Top
Pro
•••
Excellent performance and efficiency
The fact that it's written in Go means that it has excellent performance even with little resources (less RAM for example).
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Cross-platform compatibility
Gogs is written in Go, this means that Gogs can be run anywhere that Go can compile. Be it Linux, Windows or OSX.
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Free
Recommend
7
2
--
Codeberg
My Rec
ommendation
for
Codeberg
My Recommendation for
Codeberg
All
4
Pros
3
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Managed by a non-profit organization
Codeberg is community driven and managed by a non-profit organization based in Berlin, Germany. The servers are also managed by them. In conclusion, your privacy and source code is protected!
See More
Specs
Git:
Yes
SVN:
No
Platforms:
Web
Top
Pro
•••
Open source
Fully open source, no subscription plans. Every available feature is provided for free and every new feature with each update will be free as well, forever.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
GitHub like interface
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Hide
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Free
Recommend
3
2
--
Launchpad
My Rec
ommendation
for
Launchpad
My Recommendation for
Launchpad
All
9
Pros
4
Cons
4
Specs
Top
Con
•••
The web interface is complicated and hard to use
Other project hosts such as GitHub, BitBucket or GitLab have easy, simplistic UIs that help new and experienced developers alike to browse code right through the browser. LaunchPad on the other hand is very weak at this. Most of the projects have poor (if any) documentation and no way to determine a project's worth easily. The fastest way to do so with LaunchPad would be to download the project and look through the code manually, which is quite tiresome.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Free/Libre/Open source
Distributed under the AGPLv3
See More
Specs
Git:
Yes
SVN:
No
Mercurial:
No
Bazaar:
Yes
Top
Con
•••
Abandonware
Though Canonical has acknowledged the site's many shortcomings, they've expressed a clear position that they consider the site's existence an act of generosity and not an investment in a community or brand. This explains why the site has received no material improvements in well over a decade and why they are not likely to occur in the future, either.
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Top
Pro
•••
Support for web based translation
Launchpad makes it easy to translate free open source projects into virtually any language in the world. Users are allowed to start working on translating any project they want just by having a Launchpad account and a web browser. Most of the time they don't have to even join a team to start working and the editor is web based, so there is no need for any special software.
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Top
Con
•••
Slow performance
It's not uncommon to experience a timeout error for no reason once or twice a day just in the normal course of browsing the site.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Integrated build/deployment system
If you use launchpad, it gives you a build system (on their platform) as well as easier deployment - user merely adds your PPA to their sources.list file. Deployment (on Ubuntu, at least - other debians as well) doesn't get simpler than this.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Poor graphical interface
The site only has one theme and uses text sizes that don't conform to even rudimentary accessibility standards, so small that you'll need reading glasses even if you otherwise don't.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Great bug tracking features
Launchpad is built to be used for open source projects, as such it needs a powerful bug trackers to allow developers who want to contribute to jump right in. Launchpad displays bug statistics (total number of bugs, number of bugs fixed etc...) as well. Bugs can be searched and displayed from every project hosted on Launchpad or for single projects.
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FREE
Recommend
5
3
--
RhodeCode
My Rec
ommendation
for
RhodeCode
My Recommendation for
RhodeCode
All
6
Pros
5
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Supports all 3 major VCS Git, Mercurial and SVN
See More
Specs
Git:
Yes
SVN:
Yes
Mercurial:
Yes
Platforms:
Linux
See All Specs
Top
Pro
•••
High security
It's open source and it can be installed on your own machine, which gives high security and isolated environment for the codes. Whole application installation is super easy and independent from the Linux distribution.
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Powerful and flexible code review
Code reviews can be done via Pull Requests, or simply commit-by-commit. There are voting rules, random reviewers pools, and smart comment invalidation logic. Pull requests are also versioned so it's easy to review partial changes after the author has updated his code. When you create a Pull-request you can add set of reviewers. They all have to vote and approve the PR. There's some flexibility on how the voting is accepted, it can be majority wins, or all-agree. Good practice is to add BOT accounts like jenkins, that also will vote on the review, based on for example tests run, and can forbid a merge because of a negative vote. In addition users can leave special type of comments that will also prevent merges, aka TODO notes. Once TODOs are resolved a Pull Request can be merged.
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Top
Pro
•••
Advanced Full text search
Paide EE version has a really good full text search with advanced filtering options. The free CE edition has also a full text search but it's not that refined
See More
Top
Pro
•••
Open Source and available under AGPL 3 License
See More
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Get it
here
Recommend
2
--
Notabug.org
My Rec
ommendation
for
Notabug.org
My Recommendation for
Notabug.org
Hide
Get it
here
Recommend
--
Azure DevOps
My Rec
ommendation
for
Azure DevOps
My Recommendation for
Azure DevOps
All
1
Specs
Specs
Platforms:
Web, Windows, Linux, Mac
Hide
Free / paid
Recommend
--
OSDN.net
My Rec
ommendation
for
OSDN.net
My Recommendation for
OSDN.net
Hide
FREE
Recommend
--
Chisel
My Rec
ommendation
for
Chisel
My Recommendation for
Chisel
All
1
Pros
1
Top
Pro
•••
Can host Fossil reporitories
This is one of two free providers which hosts Fossil repositories
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Hide
Get it
here
Recommend
1
Don't see your favorite option? Add it.
--
CodePlex
My Rec
ommendation
for
CodePlex
My Recommendation for
CodePlex
Get it
here
Recommend
2
4
--
Google Code
My Rec
ommendation
for
Google Code
My Recommendation for
Google Code
Recommend
1
16
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