What is the best Git hosting platform in 2026?
For most teams, GitHub is still the right default. The bill, though, comes down to two lines most lists skip: price per developer and CI minutes. Check both before you commit.
Every list of Git hosts names the same three platforms and stops there. What they rarely tell you is how the bill behaves once your team grows past five people, or once your test suite starts burning through CI minutes. That is where these platforms really differ.
The short answer. You want the biggest ecosystem and a low bill: GitHub, free with unlimited private repos, then $4 per user per month on Team. You want the whole DevOps lifecycle in one tool, or on your own servers: GitLab, but budget $29 per user once more than five people share a private group. You want your code on your own hardware with no license fee: Forgejo. Your team runs on Microsoft: Azure DevOps, free for five users, then $6. Your work lives in Jira: Bitbucket.
AWS CodeCommit still shows up in well-ranked roundups. Its own pricing page says it is no longer available to new customers, so we explain below why it is not in the ranking.
The ranking is editorial: a sponsored placement is always labeled on its card, and no affiliate link ever changes a score.
8 Git hosting platforms compared
The "Team of 8" column is the monthly price on the plan that unlocks protected branches and required reviews on private repos, before any extra CI minutes. That is the moment most small product teams start paying.
| Best for | Team of 8 developers | Free plan | Team size | Visit | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GitHub | Best overall | $32 per month (Team) | 4.0/5 | Free, then $4 per user per month | ✓ | Solo developers to large teams | Visit → |
| 2 | GitLab | Best all-in-one DevOps | $232 per month (Premium) | 3.9/5 | Free up to 5 users per private group, then $29 | ✓ | DevOps teams, 5 to thousands | Visit → |
| 3 | Forgejo | Best for self-hosting | $0 in licenses | 3.8/5 | Free, open source | ✓ | Teams with someone to run a server | Visit → |
| 4 | Heptapod | Best EU-hosted option | From €56 per month | 3.7/5 | From €7 per active user per month | — | European teams | Visit → |
| 5 | Gitea | Best self-hosted with vendor support | From $76 per month (Enterprise, 8 users) | 3.6/5 | Free open source, Enterprise from $9.5 per user | ✓ | Companies that want a support contract | Visit → |
| 6 | Azure DevOps | Best for Microsoft shops | $18 per month | 3.5/5 | First 5 users free, then $6 | ✓ | .NET and Azure teams | Visit → |
| 7 | Bitbucket | Best for Jira teams | $29.20 per month (Standard) | 3.1/5 | Free up to 5 users, then $3.65 | ✓ | Teams already on Jira and Confluence | Visit → |
| 8 | Codeberg | Best nonprofit home for open source | Not applicable (no commercial private hosting) | 3.0/5 | Free, donation-funded | ✓ | Open source projects | Visit → |
Prices in US dollars, excluding tax, as listed by GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps and Gitea; Heptapod lists euros only. GitLab Premium is billed annually. Forgejo and Codeberg charge nothing: with the first you pay for your server, with the second you donate if you want.
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How we compared and rated
The top English results for this search are mostly lists. They agree on the obvious (GitHub by default, GitLab for DevOps, Bitbucket for Jira), but many quote outdated Bitbucket prices and none of them work out what CI actually costs. Some still list AWS CodeCommit as a live option.
We read each platform's official pricing page, its CI billing documentation, its self-hosting requirements and, where published, its data residency options. Then we went through forums and threads where teams explain why they left. Our reader: the CTO, tech lead or solo developer picking a home for the code of a 1 to 50 person team.
A platform makes the ranking only if it hosts private repos or installs on your own server, offers pull or merge request review and CI, and publishes enough to work out its price. None of these platforms has a Labs review page yet, so these scores are the first ones.
- Pricing and seatsFree plan, price per user, user caps on private repos, the jump in price as the team grows.25%
- Included CIMinutes or credit included, price of extra minutes, whether self-hosted runners are free.25%
- Code review and collaborationPull or merge requests, required reviewers, protected branches, issues, integrations.20%
- Self-hostingInstallable edition, license, server resources required.15%
- Data and sovereigntyServer location, EU data residency, who runs the platform.15%
No affiliate link changes a score or a rank.
GitHub
GitHub gives you unlimited private repositories on every plan, free included, with as many collaborators as you like. Free comes with 2,000 CI/CD minutes a month and 500 MB of Packages storage. Team, at $4 per user, raises that to 3,000 minutes and 2 GB. Enterprise, at $21, includes 50,000 minutes, 50 GB and, in GitHub's words, "access to GitHub Copilot".
The catch on Free is not storage. On private repos, rulesets, code owners, wikis and Pages are Team features. If you want to block a merge until someone reviews it, you pay. For eight developers that is $32 a month, still the lowest entry price among the big three.
Watch how Actions bills you. The included usage is a dollar amount, not a minute count: Free gets $12, Team $18, Enterprise Cloud $300. Linux 2-core runs at $0.006 a minute, so $12 covers the 2,000 minutes. macOS costs $0.062 a minute, which burns the same credit in roughly 190 minutes. Standard runners on public repos are free.
EU data residency exists, but only on Enterprise. GitHub also announced a $0.002 per minute fee on self-hosted runners for private repos, then postponed it after developer pushback. It was delayed, not cancelled.
- Unlimited private repos and collaborators on Free
- Team at $4 per user, the cheapest entry of the big three
- The largest Actions marketplace and integration ecosystem
- ✓Very generous free plan for solo work
- ✓Free CI on public repos
- ✓Everyone on your team already knows it
- ✗Branch protection on private repos needs Team
- ✗macOS jobs drain the Actions credit fast
- ✗EU data residency is Enterprise-only
The right default unless you have a hard sovereignty or self-hosting requirement. Move to Team the day you need enforced reviews on private code.
GitLab
GitLab covers the full lifecycle in one product, and it is the only major platform whose self-managed edition starts free. On GitLab.com, Free includes 400 compute minutes a month and 10 GiB of storage, with no credit card. Premium raises that to 10,000 minutes and 500 GiB; Ultimate to 50,000 minutes.
The limit that hurts: a private top-level group on Free counts five users, and a namespace over the limit turns read-only. On GitLab's own forum, teams complained that passive members, like a client who only reads or a colleague who only comments, used up seats, and some announced moves to GitHub, Bitbucket or self-managed GitLab. The next step is $29 per user, or $232 a month for eight developers.
The five-user cap does not apply to public groups, paid plans or the free Self-Managed edition, where you bring your own storage and runners. Size the box properly: GitLab's docs list 8 vCPU and 16 GB of memory as the baseline for a single node, and at least 8 GB in constrained environments.
Premium and Ultimate currently include GitLab credits for AI features, worth $12 and $24 per user per month, as a limited-time promotion. On-demand credits cost $1 each.
- Free Self-Managed edition with no five-user cap
- 10,000 compute minutes on Premium
- Issues, CI, security and deploys in one place
- ✓The most complete product in this ranking
- ✓Self-host it without a license
- ✓Free program for open source projects
- ✗Five users max per private group on Free
- ✗Jump straight to $29 per user
- ✗Heavy server requirements when self-hosted
The best pick if you want one platform for your whole DevOps chain, or need to host it yourself. For a small team that only needs repos and reviews, Premium is hard to justify next to GitHub Team.
Forgejo
Forgejo started as a fork of Gitea and is run by its contributors, with its domains held by the nonprofit Codeberg e.V. Since version 9.0 it is licensed GPL v3 or later; it was MIT up to 8.0. There are no plans and no seats: install it and invite whoever you want.
In self-hosting threads, Forgejo and Gitea are the names that come up most. One Lemmy user described GitLab as "an order of magnitude more complex to setup" than either. Where GitLab's docs ask for 16 GB of memory, a small VPS is usually enough for a team Forgejo instance.
CI runs on Forgejo Actions. Its own docs promise "familiarity", not compatibility, with GitHub Actions: workflow files look the same, but expect to adapt some of them. Everything a hosted platform does for you, backups, upgrades and uptime, becomes your job.
- No license fees, no seat count
- Runs on a small VPS
- Community governance, copyleft license
- ✓Your code stays on your hardware
- ✓GitHub-like interface, quick to learn
- ✓Far lighter than GitLab
- ✗Backups and upgrades are on you
- ✗Actions is not fully GitHub-compatible
- ✗No commercial support from the project
The best choice if you want full control without paying for licenses. If nobody on the team wants to own a server, pick a hosted platform instead.
Heptapod
Heptapod is a GitLab-based platform that also speaks Mercurial. Its cloud offer runs on a European cloud and is billed by Clever Cloud, a French hosting company. Pricing is usage-based, from €7 per active user per month, so an account that does nothing that month costs nothing.
For eight active developers, plan on at least €56 a month. CI runners are billed separately from €1.85 per 1,000 minutes, and cloud support starts at €100 a month. The self-hosted software is open source, but Heptapod only promised free production images for the first quarter of 2025, and self-hosted support starts at €500 a month; foss.heptapod.net hosts public open source projects at no cost.
Heptapod only lists prices in euros, which matters if you are budgeting in dollars. Its real limit is community size: when you get stuck, there are far fewer ready-made answers than for GitHub or GitLab.
- Billed in euros by a French host
- Only active users are billed
- Supports Git and Mercurial
- ✓Data on a European cloud
- ✓Familiar GitLab interface
- ✓Free self-hosted edition
- ✗Small community
- ✗CI and support cost extra
- ✗No free tier for private projects
The pick when EU hosting and a European vendor matter more than ecosystem size.
Gitea
Gitea is the project Forgejo forked from. The software stays free under the MIT license; what Gitea adds is a company selling an Enterprise edition, listed at $9.5 per user per month, with a 1-year commitment required for online payment, with a 30-day trial.
For eight developers, Enterprise comes to $76 a month, or $912 over the one-year commitment. Gitea Cloud, the hosted version, has no public price.
If you do not need support, the open source edition is enough and the choice against Forgejo comes down to license and governance. If your company wants a contract and a named vendor, it is the cheapest way in this ranking to get one for a self-hosted forge.
- MIT-licensed open source edition
- 30-day Enterprise trial
- As light to run as Forgejo
- ✓A vendor that sells support
- ✓Easy to install
- ✓No user limit on the open source edition
- ✗One-year commitment on Enterprise
- ✗No public price for Gitea Cloud
- ✗CI less mature than GitHub or GitLab
Choose it when you want a self-hosted forge plus a support contract. Without that need, Forgejo does the same job with no vendor attached.
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps bundles Azure Repos for code, Boards for tracking work and Azure Pipelines for CI. Microsoft's pricing page puts it plainly: "First 5 users free, then $6 per user per month". For eight developers that is $18 a month, the lowest bill in this ranking for that team size.
CI is sold as parallel jobs rather than minutes. One Microsoft-hosted job is free with 1,800 minutes a month; each extra hosted job is $40 a month. On your own machines, the first job is free with unlimited minutes and each extra one is $15. Artifacts storage is free up to 2 GiB, then from $2 per GiB.
The limit is reach. Outside .NET and Azure, the community and the integration catalog are much thinner than on GitHub, which Microsoft also owns.
- 5 free users, then $6
- One self-hosted job free with unlimited minutes
- Boards and test plans built in
- ✓Cheapest bill for a team of eight
- ✓Free self-hosted CI
- ✓Artifacts free up to 2 GiB
- ✗Only one free hosted job
- ✗Thin ecosystem outside Microsoft
- ✗Test Plans at $52 per user
A smart pick for teams already in the Microsoft world. Everyone else gets more from GitHub for a similar price.
Bitbucket
Atlassian's Bitbucket has the lowest per-user price of any paid plan here: $3.65 on Standard, or $29.20 a month for eight developers. Public and private repos are unlimited. Premium, at $8, adds enforced merge checks, IP allowlisting, deployment permissions and required two-factor authentication. Many lists still quote older prices; these are the ones on Atlassian's page.
CI is the weak spot on Free: Bitbucket Pipelines gives you 50 build minutes a month. On the Atlassian Community, one user watched a single stuck 120-minute build eat the whole month; the answer was to buy minutes or wait. Standard includes 2,500 minutes, Premium 3,500, and each extra 1,000 minutes costs $10.
Runner size multiplies usage too: a 5-minute step on a 2x runner counts as 10 minutes. Support on Free is community-only; the 99.9% SLA comes with Premium.
- $3.65 per user on Standard
- Native Jira linking
- Free community and academic subscription
- ✓Cheapest paid seat in this ranking
- ✓Unlimited private repos
- ✓Advanced merge checks on Premium
- ✗50 CI minutes on Free, no top-ups
- ✗Larger runners double the minutes
- ✗Little reason to pick it without Jira
Worth it if your team lives in Jira. Without Jira, GitHub Team costs barely more and ships with far more CI.
Codeberg
Codeberg is run by Codeberg e.V., a German nonprofit, mostly on its "own hardware in a rented facility in Berlin". It runs on Forgejo, costs nothing and lives on donations. You cannot pay for an exception to its rules.
It is not a business host: "Codeberg does not offer private hosting services." Private repos are tolerated up to 100 MB for free software contributors, and you need to ask before going past 750 MiB of Git data or 1.5 GiB of packages. CI, through Woodpecker, is also on request.
Well-known projects have moved there: Zig in 2025, leaving its GitHub repo read-only, and Gentoo in 2026, citing repeated pushes to use Copilot. In community threads, users like the mission but note a less polished UI and less mature Actions, while others stay on GitHub for its contributor base and because job listings ask for a GitHub link.
- Nonprofit, servers in Berlin
- Free, no paid tier
- Built on Forgejo
- ✓No dependency on a big tech company
- ✓Free for open source
- ✓Notable projects already there
- ✗No commercial private use
- ✗CI on request only
- ✗Less discoverable than GitHub
The right home for an open source project that wants independence. For a company's private code, look at a self-hosted Forgejo or at Heptapod.
The right platform for your team
There is no single best Git host. Here is what we would pick in the five situations we see most.
Solo developer or side project
FreeGitHub Free. Unlimited private repos and 2,000 CI minutes cover almost any side project, and standard runners on public repos cost nothing. Missing branch protection does not matter when you are the only one pushing.
- Platform
- GitHub Free
- Budget
- $0
- Watch
- macOS jobs
Startup with 3 to 15 developers
TeamGitHub Team at $4 per user, so you can require reviews on private repos. Beware of GitLab Free: it works at five, then your sixth hire puts everyone on $29. If you plan in Jira, Bitbucket Standard costs about the same as GitHub Team.
- Platform
- GitHub Team
- Budget for 8
- $32 per month
- Alternative
- Bitbucket with Jira
Team that wants the whole DevOps chain
All-in-oneGitLab Premium if the budget allows: issues, CI, security and deployment with 10,000 minutes a month. Otherwise, free GitLab Self-Managed on your own server, provided you have the machine and the time to maintain it.
- Platform
- GitLab
- Budget for 8
- $232 per month or $0 self-managed
- Server
- 8 vCPU, 16 GB
Company that needs data in the EU
ResidencyThree routes. Heptapod for a European cloud billed in euros. Forgejo or Gitea on your own EU server, so you depend on no one. Or GitHub Enterprise with EU data residency at $21 per user, if you want to stay on GitHub.
- Hosted
- Heptapod
- Self-hosted
- Forgejo or Gitea
- On GitHub
- Enterprise
Open source project
PublicGitHub for visibility and free CI on public repos. Codeberg if you want an independent home. Plenty of maintainers do both: the canonical repo on Codeberg or a Forgejo instance, mirrored to GitHub so people can find it.
- Visibility
- GitHub
- Independence
- Codeberg
- Tip
- Mirror
What your Git host really costs
Your bill has two lines: seats and CI compute. Seats are easy to compare. Minutes are not, because every platform meters them differently. Calculated from public list prices, before tax and before any extra minutes.
Team of 3: everyone has a free tier
Team of 8: the gaps open up
Minutes: the hidden line
The workaround: your own runners
Platforms we left out
These names keep showing up in roundups. Either they no longer take new customers, or they serve too narrow an audience for a general ranking.
SourceHut: the minimalist's forge
NicheA minimalist forge, still in public alpha. You pick $4, $8 or $12 a month, all with the same features: the tier is about how much you want to support the project. Payment is required for CI (builds.sr.ht) and optional for Git hosting during the alpha, and financial aid is available.
Radicle: peer-to-peer Git
ExperimentalRadicle reached 1.0 in 2024. It syncs Git repos between peers with no central server, and keeps issues and reviews inside the repo itself. Interesting for projects that refuse any company in the loop, still niche for a working team.
AWS CodeCommit: closed to new customers
ExcludedIts official pricing page says "AWS CodeCommit is no longer available to new customers", while an AWS blog post announced it was back. With two official sources disagreeing, we do not rank it. If it already holds your repos, nothing forces a move, but check with AWS before starting anything new there.
Google Cloud Source Repositories: no longer sold
ExcludedGoogle stopped selling it to new customers in 2024. If a list still recommends it, that list is out of date.
What teams learn the hard way
Small settings that change the bill or save you a bad month, pulled from vendor documentation and developer forums.
Only use macOS runners when you must
GitHubA macOS minute costs $0.062 on GitHub Actions, against $0.006 for Linux 2-core. Run tests and linting on Linux and keep macOS for iOS builds. Your free credit stretches from about 190 minutes to 2,000.
Set a timeout on every pipeline
BitbucketA hung build keeps burning minutes until something stops it. On Bitbucket Free's 50 minutes, one two-hour build wipes out the month, with no way to top up. Add a max time to your pipeline config before your first push.
Audit members before relying on GitLab Free
GitLabThe five-user cap counts every member of the private group, including people who only comment. Move read-only stakeholders out of the group, and if you are an open source project, apply to GitLab's open source program.
Ask for Bitbucket's community plan
BitbucketNonprofits and schools can get Bitbucket free with unlimited private repos, 5 GB of LFS and 500 build minutes, ten times the regular free allowance.
Keep a mirror on a second host
ResiliencePush your main repo to a second platform automatically. If one host goes down or changes its prices, your code and its full history already live elsewhere. Issues and pipelines do not follow, so export them separately.
Track GitHub's self-hosted runner fee
GitHubGitHub planned to charge $0.002 per minute for self-hosted runners on private repos, then postponed it. One user put their extra cost at "close to $3.5k a month". If all your CI runs on your own machines, redo the math if GitHub brings it back.
Picked your platform? Next steps
Leaving a platform, or connecting your repos to the rest of your stack? These pages go further.
Where to go and how to migrate.
GitLab got too expensiveGitLab alternativesLife after the five-user cap.
You are leaving BitbucketBitbucket alternativesWith or without Jira.
You want a different coding assistantGitHub Copilot alternativesAI assistants for developers.
You want to automate around your repoConnect GitHub to n8nIssues, alerts, deploys.
You run GitLab and n8nConnect GitLab to n8nThe most useful automations.
Git hosting · FAQ
Is GitHub free for private repositories?
Yes. Since 2020, GitHub Free includes unlimited private repos with unlimited collaborators. What private repos lack on Free: rulesets, code owners, wikis and Pages, which need Team at $4 per user per month.What is the difference between Git and GitHub?
Git is the version control tool that tracks your code's history on your machine, with no account or server. GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket host Git repositories and add collaboration on top: pull requests, reviews, issues and CI. You can switch hosts without changing how you use Git.Is GitHub or GitLab better for a company?
GitHub if you mainly need hosting and code review, at $4 per user. GitLab if you want the full DevOps lifecycle in one tool or need to self-host. Past five users in a private group, GitLab costs $29 per user, more than seven times GitHub Team.Which Git hosts offer EU data residency?
GitHub offers EU residency on Enterprise only, at $21 per user. Heptapod runs on a European cloud and bills in euros. Codeberg's servers are mostly in Berlin, for open source projects. Or self-host Forgejo or Gitea on an EU server.What is the best self-hosted Git server?
Forgejo or Gitea for small and mid-size teams, since both run on a small VPS. GitLab Self-Managed if you want the full DevOps suite, but its docs ask for 8 vCPU and 16 GB of memory for a single node. Whatever you pick, set up backups first.How many free CI minutes does each platform give?
GitHub Free includes 2,000 Linux minutes a month, Azure DevOps 1,800 with one hosted job, GitLab Free 400 and Bitbucket Free 50. On your own runners, GitHub and Bitbucket do not count minutes, and Azure DevOps gives one job with unlimited minutes.Can I move my repos from one Git host to another?
Yes for the code itself: a Git repo copies over with its full history, branches and tags. Pull requests, issues, secrets and CI pipelines take more work, because each platform stores them its own way.