This post is part of a series on moving off American software.
GitHub is where most code lives, and it is also the least contested category in this series. Microsoft owns it, and the European alternatives are fewer and smaller than in analytics or hosting. They are real, though, and for many projects — open source in particular — entirely workable.
Set expectations honestly: if your team leans on GitHub-specific tooling and integrations, the migration cost here is higher than in any other post in this series. If you mainly need git hosting, issues, and CI/CD, the options below cover it.
A note on what "version control service" means in this context: beyond hosting git repositories, these platforms typically bundle project management — an issue tracker integrated with the code — and continuous integration and delivery tools. That is the feature set to compare against your actual GitHub usage, not the ecosystem marketplace.
All of them come from companies or organizations based in the EU or EFTA, per the listing criteria on European Alternatives.
Codeberg: non-profit hosting for open source
Codeberg is a version control service for open-source projects, based in Germany and hosted in the EU. It is run as a non-profit and built on Forgejo, an open-source version control platform.
If you want your open-source project off US corporate infrastructure without operating your own server, Codeberg is the straightforward answer. The constraint is in the name: it is for open-source work, not a general home for private company repositories. For everything an open-source project typically needs — repositories, issues, and releases in one place — it covers the basics without asking you to think about infrastructure at all.
GitLab: the heavyweight option
GitLab is open-core version control software. The community edition is open source and self-hostable; the proprietary tier adds features on top. It bundles issues, wikis, pages, and CI/CD pipelines — the closest in scope to what GitHub offers in a single product.
You do not have to run it yourself. GitLab by Stackhero (France) is a managed GitLab service, which moves the patching and operation onto a European provider.
Forgejo and Gitea: self-hosting first
Forgejo and Gitea are both open-source version control software with a focus on being lightweight and fast. One governance detail matters when choosing between them: Forgejo was created as a fork of Gitea after Gitea was acquired by a for-profit company. Codeberg uses Forgejo as the code base for its platform, which means Forgejo gets exercised at production scale.
Neither is a hosted service in the way GitHub is — you run them on your own server. Paired with a European VPS, as covered in our AWS alternatives post linked below, that is a fully European stack.
Which one fits
- Open-source project, want hosting handled: Codeberg.
- Broadest feature set including CI/CD, prefer managed: GitLab, via Stackhero or self-hosted.
- Lightweight self-hosting, community governance: Forgejo.
- Already invested in Gitea: it remains a solid, fast option — just note the for-profit acquisition when weighing its future direction.
None of these will feel identical to GitHub on day one, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Actions you rely on may need rewriting for a different CI system; third-party integrations may not exist. For teams whose workflow is git, issues, and pipelines, the gap is small and shrinking. For teams deep into the GitHub ecosystem, budget real migration time — and consider running the new forge in parallel for a month before cutting over.
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