GitHub Alternatives (Free, Paid, Self-Hosted)

The trending news of yesterday was the acquisition of GitHub (the world’s leading software development platform) by Microsoft. This is a great deal for Microsoft which might put it in the position it was about 10 years ago in the software market. But a lot of open-source fans are unhappy with this.

A couple of years ago Microsoft was anti-open-source.

“Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer. I can’t imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business.” - Jim Allchin (Former Windows chief), 2001

“Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.” - Steve Ballmer (Former CEO)

However, in recent years Microsoft has tried hard to catch up with the open-source world. They are promoting themselves as a supporter of open-source. They have open-sourced some of their projects and also joined The Linux Foundation as a platinum member.

Nobody knows whether they are doing this because they accepted that open-source is good or they are just trying to stay in the business by getting the attention of open-source users. Surely there are trust issues. Some GitHub users have already started looking for alternatives.

Below is a list of some popular services similar to GitHub:

Most of the users on Social Media seem to be choosing GitLab as a replacement for GitHub.

Features:

Issue board, Issue tracker (with due dates)

Built-in CI/CD

Unlimited private repositories

Faster file search

Cherry pick changes

File locking

Web IDE

Wiki for project

Ad free

Code review and comments are supported in pull requests

Static/Dynamic Application Security Testing, Docker container scanning

Smart Mirroring for faster clone, fetch, pull (Premium)

Host static websites

GitLab statistics shows that a lot of repos have been imported from GitHub in past few hours.

An Atlassian product which is the most popular alternative to GitHub.

Features:

Unlimited private repositories

JIRA integration

2 factor authentication

LFS support

Source code search

Wiki for project

Issue tracker

Ad free

Code review and comments are supported in pull requests

BitBucket cloud for hosting static websites (similar to GitHub pages)

Smart Mirroring for faster clone, fetch, pull (Premium)

Pricing:

Bitbucket Data Center vs GitHub Enterprise

A lightweight GitHub clone (forked from GoGs) written in Go lang.

Features:

GitHub clone

Runs on Windows, Mac and Linux

Lightweight (Even supports Raspberry Pi)

Install from binary

Ship with docker, vagrant or as a package

Repo viewer

Issue tracker

Wiki

API support

Help (Support Forum and Chat)

One of the oldest (since 1999) to offer free services to open source projects.

Features:

Issue tracking

Code hosting

Mirroing

Wiki

Mailing lists

Support forums

User reviews on projects

Micro-blog for project

Unlimited bandwidth

Download statistics

Tool to import GitHub projects

A Canonical product, which is quite famous for hosting Ubuntu projects.

Features:

Issue tracking

Code hosting (supports both Git and Bazaar)

Code reviews

Build and host Ubuntu projects

Mailing lists

Translations

FAQs

Specification tracking

A Google product which is a part of Google Cloud.

Features:

Connect your repo from BitBucket or GitHub

Source code browser

Debug and error reporting tools

Stable and easily scalable infrastructure

CI through Container Builder

Preinstalled tools (Programming languages, Cloud shell, and Shell Editor)

Faster deployment through App Engine

Deployment through custom triggers (HTTP, Pub/Sub etc.)

Pricing:

An Amazon product which is similar to Cloud Source Repo, if you already have an AWS account you get it for free (Maximum 5 users allowed per month).

Features:

Hosted on AWS

Encrypted repositories

Code review and comments are supported in pull requests

Scalable

No limit on size or type of data

Easy migration from other services

Pricing:

Features:

Source code hosting

Git, Mercurial, SVN support

Code review and auditing

Wiki

Issue tracker

Workboard

Chat channel

Command line tools (lint, unit-tests)

API support

Pricing:

A git platform on JVM.

Features:

Powered with Scala

Highly scalable

GitHub API compatible

Repo viewer

Issue tracker

Wiki

Plugin support

An easy to install and lightweight GitHub clone written in Go.

Features:

GitHub clone

Install from binary

Ship with docker, vagrant or as a package

Cross platform support

Lightweight (runs on Raspberry Pi)

Repo viewer

Issue tracker

Wiki

A GitHub clone written in Perl.

Features:

GitHub clone

Portable

Issue tracker

CGI support

Built-in web server

SSL Support

Public key auth support

A product from Apache. Sourceforge runs on Allura.

Features:

Code repo

Supports Git, Mercurial, SVN

Issue tracker

Discussion forums

Wiki

Mailing lists

Do let us know which alternative do you like the most?