head to head
Jira vs Gitea
Gitea is the open source alternative to Jira — issue tracker and project management for software teams. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — Gitea is a viable free replacement for Jira. Gitea is open source under MIT, written in Go, with 58,048 GitHub stars, 7,153 forks and 2,455 open issues; it was last pushed 8 hours ago. Jira costs from $8, while self-hosting Gitea carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 5 other open source Jira alternatives are tracked here, led by Plane at 59,546 stars. Gitea ranks #2 of 6 tracked open source Jira alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: Plane (59,546 stars), Huly (27,700 stars), Wekan (21,089 stars), Vikunja (5,438 stars), Taiga (850 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to Gitea and 3 reasons to stay on Jira.
choose Gitea if
- Your Jira bill is growing with seats or usage
- You need your data in a format and server you control
- Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
- You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort
stick with Jira if
- You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
- Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
- You depend on a Jira integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated
Side by side
| Gitea (open source) | Jira | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | $8.15-$16/user/month |
| License | MIT | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — go-gitea/gitea | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 58K · ⑂ 7.2K | — |
| Built with | Go | — |
Why people look for a Jira alternative
About Gitea
Gitea is a self hosted, all in one software development service written in Go. It provides Git hosting, code review, issue tracking, project management (kanban), wiki, team collaboration, package registry, and CI/CD capabilities. The project aims to deliver a lightweight, painless alternative to larger platforms by running as a single binary across Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows on multiple architectures.
read the full Gitea overview →
Other open source alternatives to Jira
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is Gitea a good replacement for Jira?
Gitea is an open source alternative to Jira (Issue tracker and project management for software teams). It is written in Go and licensed under MIT, with 58,048 GitHub stars.
Is Gitea free compared to Jira?
Yes. Gitea is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Jira is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.
How do I migrate from Jira to Gitea?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check Gitea's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.