head to head · open source
Gitea vs go-git
Gitea has 58,826 GitHub stars, 7,348 forks, 2,455 open issues and last shipped yesterday. go-git has 7,841 stars, 1,072 forks, 248 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Gitea leads on adoption by 650% (58,826 vs 7,841 stars). Gitea is written in Go under MIT; go-git is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Gitea has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, go-git 14%. go-git was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (git, git-server), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Gitea | go-git | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 59K | ★ 7.8K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.3K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Gitea if
- You weight community size — 59K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick go-git if
- You want the go-git feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and go-git fits your workflow better
About Gitea
Gitea 繁體中文 简体中文 Purpose The goal of Gitea is to make the easiest, fastest, and most painless way of setting up a self hosted all in one software development service, including Git hosting, code management, code review, issue tracking, project kanban, wiki, team collaboration, package registry and CI/CD which can reuse GitHub Actions. As Gitea is written in Go, it works across all the platforms and architectures that are supported by Go, including Linux, macOS, FreeBSD/OpenBSD and Windows on x86, amd64, ARM, RISC V 64 and PowerPC architectures. For online demonstrations, you can visit demo.gitea.com. For…
read the full Gitea overview →
About go-git
go git is a highly extensible git implementation library written in pure Go . It can be used to manipulate git repositories at low level (plumbing) or high level (porcelain) , through an idiomatic Go API. It also supports several types of storage, such as in memory filesystems, or custom implementations, thanks to the Storer interface. It has been actively developed since 2015 and is used extensively by Keybase, Gitea, and Pulumi, among many other libraries and tools. It is also a dependency in major CNCF projects such as Kubernetes Prow and Flux. Project Status For the full backstory see HISTORY.md. The project…
read the full go-git overview →
More in Developer Tools
Related comparisons
More Version Control & Collaboration projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Version Control & Collaboration field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Gitea or go-git more popular?
Gitea has 58,826 GitHub stars and go-git has 7,841. Gitea has the larger community by that measure.
Are Gitea and go-git free?
Both are open source. Gitea is licensed under MIT and go-git under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Gitea and go-git?
Gitea is written in Go and go-git in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Gitea or go-git?
Choose Gitea if you want the larger community (58,826 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose go-git if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.