The Gitea fork story

In late 2022, Gitea Ltd commercialized aggressively, alienating the volunteer maintainers who built the project. Forgejo emerged as the community fork in December 2022 and by 2024 had outpaced Gitea on feature velocity. Codeberg (the largest non-profit Git host) runs Forgejo, as does the FSF.

EmpireGit runs Forgejo 7.x with empire-specific extensions: native Stripe billing, LLM-aware code review, and one-click GitHub import.

Forgejo vs Gitea (2026)

| Feature | Gitea 1.22 | Forgejo 7.x | |---|---|---| | Pull request reviews | yes | yes | | Actions (GitHub-compatible) | yes | yes | | Packages registry | yes | yes | | Projects / kanban | yes | yes | | Wiki | yes | yes | | Open governance | no (Ltd) | yes (community) | | Update cadence | quarterly | monthly |

Why not GitLab CE

GitLab CE is excellent — but the open-source edition lacks SAML SSO, audit logs, and SCIM provisioning. The Premium edition that adds these costs $29/user/month, identical to EmpireGit Team. We chose Forgejo because the cost is in our infrastructure (which we control) not in per-seat licensing (which the vendor controls).

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