Best European Alternatives to GitHub
Looking for a European alternative to GitHub? Microsoft-owned GitHub stores all your code on US servers. European and self-hosted alternatives offer code hosting with data sovereignty.
European and self-hosted Git platforms offer code hosting, CI/CD, and collaboration while keeping your intellectual property in Europe.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
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European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA or Switzerland, and processes customer data in Europe. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a vendor. Paid placement can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. Editorial policy
Why Choose a European Alternative to GitHub?
GDPR Protection
Your data stays in Europe, protected by the world's strongest privacy laws.
EU Data Centers
Data processed and stored exclusively within the European Union.
No US Surveillance
Free from CLOUD Act and other US data access laws.
Quality Alternatives
Comparable features with European quality and support.
Best European Alternatives to GitHub
Privacy-focused alternatives from European companies, evaluated for features, privacy, and GDPR compliance.
GitLab
Complete DevOps platform, can be self-hosted in EU
Key takeaways
- GitHub does offer an EU region, but only on GHE.com with Enterprise Managed Users — and managed users cannot own public repositories or gists.
- GHE.com also drops macOS runners, Maven and Gradle packages, and the browsable Marketplace, which is the part of the bill nobody forecasts.
- Gitea and Forgejo read GitHub Actions workflow syntax, so the automation moves; GitLab CI does not, so it gets rewritten.
- Codeberg is free and excellent and will not host your proprietary code: its terms limit the platform to free and open source projects.
- Keeping a mirror on GitHub for discoverability is not a failure of nerve; it is the only way to move the repository without losing the audience.
Why people leave GitHub
Hardly anyone leaves GitHub because the product disappoints. Pull requests, code search, Actions and the fact that every developer you hire already has an account are a genuine moat, and no page should pretend otherwise.
The reason to look elsewhere is narrower and more awkward. GitHub does sell a European answer — GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency, on a ghe.com address, with an EU region that includes the Azure regions in Norway and Switzerland. Buying it means running your enterprise on Enterprise Managed Users, and an enterprise with managed users cannot have public repositories or gists. The sovereign version of GitHub is the one where you cannot publish in the open.
Behind that sits the ownership question. Microsoft completed its purchase of GitHub on 26 October 2018 for $7.5 billion in stock, and on 11 August 2025 Thomas Dohmke said he would leave at the end of that year, with no direct replacement announced. Whatever you think of that, the decisions about your forge are taken one level above the forge.
- The EU region and the open source are sold separately This is the detail that decides most of these moves. Data residency on GHE.com is only available to an enterprise running Enterprise Managed Users, and managed users cannot own public repositories or gists. A company that publishes libraries, runs a documentation site out of a repository or accepts drive-by pull requests has to keep a second, ordinary GitHub.com presence for that work — which puts it straight back where it started.
- GHE.com is a smaller GitHub than github.com GitHub's own feature list for the residency product records what is missing: no macOS runners for Actions, no Maven or Gradle support in Packages, no dependency insights at organisation or enterprise level, no Marketplace to browse (apps are installed from their source), and no audit-log streaming to Amazon S3 with OIDC. Marketplace actions that call api.github.com directly do not work without being rewritten. None of that is hidden, and all of it lands on the same team doing the migration.
- Getting in is easier than getting out, by design The ordinary GitHub Importer is disabled on GHE.com; migrations go through GitHub Enterprise Importer instead, and every API call has to be pointed at your own enterprise hostname rather than api.github.com. Repositories move because git is git. Everything wrapped around them — automation, apps, tokens, webhooks — is a rebuild, whether you are moving to Europe or to Redmond.
- The workflows are the lock-in, not the code A repository is portable by construction: clone it and you have all of it. Actions is not. The marketplace action you use to publish a release, the composite workflow someone wrote in 2021, the OIDC trust between your repository and your cloud account — those are GitHub-shaped, and they are the actual switching cost. Count the workflow files before you count the seats.
What you have to replace, not just match
GitHub does three separate jobs and the tools below answer them unevenly, so decide which one you are actually moving.
The first is hosting and review: repositories, branches, pull requests, permissions. Every option here does that, and does it well enough that nobody will complain after a fortnight. The second is automation: Actions, runners, the marketplace. Gitea and Forgejo take GitHub Actions syntax; GitLab makes you rewrite pipelines; Codeberg runs Woodpecker CI; SourceHut has builds.sr.ht and an entirely different shape of workflow.
The third job is the audience. A public GitHub repository is discoverable, gets stars from strangers and receives patches from people who will never meet you. Nothing on this page reproduces that, and honest advice is to keep a read-only mirror on GitHub for reach while the authoritative copy lives in Europe.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | GitLab | Rotterdam, Netherlands | Free tier / Premium $29 per user per month / Ultimate $99 per user per month | EU (Netherlands) |
| #2 | Codeberg | Berlin, Germany | Free | EU (Germany) |
| #3 | Gitea | Berlin, Germany | Free (self-hosted) | Self-hosted; project has a commercial entity |
| #4 | SourceHut | Europe | Free during alpha; paid plans expected from about $2 per month or $20 per year | EU |
How each alternative compares to GitHub
- Which law reaches it. EU (Netherlands). GitHub is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Self-hosted anywhere, or SaaS with EU data residency options.
- Source code. Open source, where GitHub is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Organisations replacing the whole GitHub estate rather than the git hosting alone
GitLab is the only option here that answers every job GitHub does in one product: repositories and review, CI/CD, a container and package registry, security scanning, and issue and epic planning under a single permissions model. For an organisation that has spread across GitHub, Actions, a third-party scanner and a separate planning tool, that consolidation is the reason to look.
Be precise about what it fixes, because the directory ranks it first and that can be read as more than it is. GitLab Inc. operates from San Francisco, so choosing the hosted service does not move the supplier out of American reach.
What GitLab genuinely gives you that GitHub does not is permission: the Community Edition is open source and you may run the whole platform on your own hardware, in a country you chose, on a schedule you set. GitHub's comparable answer is GHE.com, and that comes with Enterprise Managed Users attached.
The cost is weight and a rewrite. Self-managed GitLab wants real resources and real maintenance, its breadth is more than a ten-person team will ever use, and every GitHub Actions workflow becomes a GitLab CI pipeline written from scratch. Budget the pipelines, not the repositories.
What GitLab does better than GitHub
- You may run the entire platform yourself under an open-source licence, where GitHub's self-managed answer is a separate Enterprise Server product
- Public projects stay public on a self-managed instance, which the GHE.com residency route does not allow
- Repositories, pipelines, registry, scanning and planning arrive as one product instead of an Enterprise plan plus a marketplace
- The code is open, so security behaviour can be inspected rather than accepted on a vendor's word
- A free tier with unlimited private repositories, where GitHub reserves its enterprise controls for $21 per user per month
Where GitLab is a step down from GitHub
- GitLab Inc. is an American company, so the hosted service does not answer the jurisdiction question that GitHub raises
- GitHub Actions workflows do not port; GitLab CI is a rewrite rather than a migration
- Heavier to run than any other option here, and heavier than GitHub feels to use
- The ecosystem of third-party apps and integrations is a fraction of GitHub's
Standout against GitHub. It is the only replacement on this page where the whole of GitHub — host, pipelines, registry, scanning — arrives in one install that you are allowed to run yourself.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). GitHub is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU (Germany).
- Source code. Open source, where GitHub is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Open-source projects whose objection is being a product inside somebody else's subsidiary
Codeberg is the exact opposite of the GHE.com bargain. Where GitHub's European region requires an enterprise that cannot own a public repository, Codeberg exists for public repositories and asks for nothing: git hosting, issues, wikis, a package registry that includes container images, Pages with custom domains and automatic HTTPS, and Woodpecker CI, run by a registered German association rather than a subsidiary of a listed company.
The governance is not decoration. In July 2026 the members voted a rule about largely machine-generated projects into the terms of use, and the announcement that came with it stated plainly that the forge does not and will not use the code or data it hosts to train "Artificial Intelligence" tools — a commitment a platform owned by an AI vendor is structurally unable to make.
The terms also name cryptocurrency projects as content Codeberg will not carry. You may disagree with either rule; you can at least read them, and vote on them if you join.
The limit is the thing people discover late. Codeberg's terms open the service to projects under a free and open source licence, with private repositories permitted for what such a project needs rather than as a home for proprietary work. If you are moving a company off GitHub, this replaces the public half only.
What Codeberg does better than GitHub
- Public repositories are the point here, where GitHub's EU residency product forbids them
- Run by a German association whose members elect the board, rather than by a company owned by Microsoft
- A published undertaking not to train AI tools on hosted code, which GitHub's owner is in no position to give
- Free at any size, including Pages with custom domains and Let's Encrypt certificates
- A package registry that accepts container images, so releases and images can live beside the source
Where Codeberg is a step down from GitHub
- Not available for proprietary company code: the terms limit the platform to free and open source projects
- Shared CI capacity queues when everyone builds at once, where GitHub-hosted runners simply scale
- No SAML single sign-on, enterprise policy controls or audit log API
- No equivalent of code scanning, Dependabot or the security advisories GitHub gives away
Standout against GitHub. It is the only place on this page where moving to Europe does not require closing the repository — which is precisely the trade GitHub asks for.
- Which law reaches it. Self-hosted; project has a commercial entity. GitHub is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Wherever you deploy it.
- Source code. Open source, where GitHub is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Teams that want their existing workflow files to keep running somewhere else
Gitea is the pragmatic exit. It installs as a single Go binary with a database behind it, runs happily on hardware you would not dare point GitLab at, and — the part that decides migrations — Gitea Actions implements GitHub Actions workflow syntax. A team whose objection to leaving GitHub was the fortnight of pipeline work often finds that objection largely evaporates.
Largely, not entirely. The workflow file, jobs, steps and environment handling carry over; the marketplace does not. Anything that pulls a third-party action from GitHub.com, or that assumes api.github.com answers, needs vendoring or replacing. The honest test is to take your three noisiest repositories, run them on a Gitea runner for a week, and count what broke.
One fact worth having before you commit, because it is not obvious: the commercial company behind the project is CommitGo, Inc., which sells Gitea Enterprise and a hosted Gitea Cloud and gives no address or place of business anywhere on its own site. For a self-hosted instance that is irrelevant — the software is yours, on your hardware, under your law. For the hosted product it is exactly the question you left GitHub over, and it is why Forgejo exists.
What Gitea does better than GitHub
- Gitea Actions reads GitHub Actions workflow syntax, so the automation moves instead of being rewritten
- One binary and a database, deployable in a jurisdiction you choose, with no Enterprise Managed Users attached
- Public and private repositories on the same instance, which GHE.com does not permit
- No per-seat licence at all when self-hosted, against $21 per user per month for GitHub Enterprise
- Light enough to run on a small virtual machine, so a European host costs tens of euros rather than thousands
Where Gitea is a step down from GitHub
- The GitHub Actions marketplace does not come with the syntax; third-party actions need vendoring or replacing
- The commercial entity behind the project, CommitGo, Inc., publishes no European establishment, which matters for Gitea Cloud rather than for your own instance
- No code scanning, secret scanning or dependency alerts of the kind GitHub includes
- Somebody in your team owns upgrades, backups and restores from now on
Standout against GitHub. It is the only forge here that will run the workflow files you already have, which turns a migration into a redirect.
- Which law reaches it. EU. GitHub is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU.
- Source code. Open source, where GitHub is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Maintainers who want mail, patches and a plain page rather than a platform
SourceHut is not a smaller GitHub; it is a set of separate services — git hosting, mailing lists, builds, a to-do tracker — assembled by the user rather than by the vendor. Patches arrive by email and are reviewed on a list, which is how the kernel has always worked and is nothing like a pull request queue. Teams either recognise this immediately or should not attempt it.
Two things make it more than a curiosity for this page. It is registered in the Netherlands, in Hoorn, under KVK number 84165251, so the operator sits inside the EU without any regional add-on to purchase. And on 15 April 2025 it published a piece titled "You cannot have our user's data", which is the sort of position a forge takes when nobody above it can overrule the decision — the structural difference from a subsidiary whose parent decides.
The limits are severe and deliberate. It remains in public alpha, plans run €4, €8 or €12 a month at whatever level you judge fair, and only builds.sr.ht and chat.sr.ht require payment during the alpha. There is no web merge button, no SSO, no audit log and no compliance certificate, so an enterprise buyer can stop reading here.
What SourceHut does better than GitHub
- A Dutch operator with an EU registration, where GitHub sells the EU as an enterprise add-on with conditions
- Nothing to configure away: no marketplace, no bots, no suggested actions, no AI features to disable
- Mailing-list review keeps the project's history in an archive you own rather than in a vendor's issue database
- Pricing you choose by conscience rather than per seat, from €4 a month
Where SourceHut is a step down from GitHub
- The email patch workflow is a genuine retraining cost for a team raised on pull requests
- No SSO, audit logs or compliance certifications, which rules it out of most procurement
- Still in public alpha, with the changes that implies
- No equivalent of Actions, code scanning or the GitHub ecosystem — by choice, but the gap is real
Standout against GitHub. A forge whose operator has written down, in public, that it will not hand over your data — and which has no parent company able to overrule that.
What actually breaks when you switch
Start with an inventory of automation rather than repositories. Count workflow files, third-party actions, self-hosted runners, deploy keys, webhooks and any OIDC trust between a repository and a cloud account. That list is the migration; the repositories themselves are a mirror clone and an afternoon.
Then decide what happens to the public face. Stars, forks, sponsor buttons and the traffic that comes from being on github.com do not transfer, and a project that vanishes overnight loses contributors it will not get back. A mirror with a one-line notice about where patches are accepted costs nothing and keeps the door open.
Finally, plan for issues and pull request history to arrive imperfectly. The API exports them and every forge here imports something, but comment threads, review state and cross-references rarely survive in full. Most teams archive the old repository read-only, import what imports cleanly, and accept that the archaeology stays on GitHub.
If GitHub has an EU region, is there anything left to solve?
For a company with only private repositories, much less than this page might suggest. GHE.com stores your in-scope data in the region you pick, the EU option covers the Azure regions in Norway and Switzerland as well, and for a procurement question about storage location that is a complete answer.
It stops being a complete answer in two places. GitHub, Inc. remains a US company owned by Microsoft, so a lawful US order still reaches the operator of the platform regardless of the region. And the residency product requires Enterprise Managed Users, which removes public repositories and gists, so an organisation that publishes anything open has to run two GitHub presences and reconcile them.
If neither of those bites, the honest recommendation is to buy the Enterprise plan and stop reading. This page is for the organisations where one of them does.
What happens to our GitHub Actions workflows?
It depends where you land, and the difference is large enough to decide the choice on its own. Gitea Actions and Forgejo Actions consume GitHub Actions workflow syntax, so jobs, steps and environment handling usually carry across; what breaks is marketplace actions you do not control, which have to be vendored, replaced or rewritten.
GitLab CI is a different language with a different mental model. Pipelines are rewritten rather than ported, and that is a week of work for a simple repository and a quarter for a monorepo with matrix builds and reusable workflows.
Codeberg gives you Woodpecker CI and lets you attach your own runners; SourceHut gives you builds.sr.ht, which is a manifest and a virtual machine rather than a marketplace. Both are perfectly capable and neither will accept your existing YAML.
Can we keep the public project on GitHub and move everything else?
Yes, and for most organisations it is the sensible first move. Put the authoritative repository on the European forge, push a mirror to GitHub, and leave issues open in both places for a release cycle to see where people actually turn up.
The thing to decide in advance is where a patch is accepted. A mirror that silently ignores pull requests annoys contributors more than a plain notice telling them where to send work. Gitea, Forgejo and Codeberg all support pull mirroring, so the plumbing is not the hard part.
The cost of the split is that stars, sponsors and search ranking stay on the GitHub side. That is the price of the audience, and it is worth paying for a project whose contributors are strangers.
Is a self-hosted forge really cheaper than GitHub Enterprise?
On the licence line, obviously: Enterprise starts at $21 per user per month at list and Gitea or Forgejo is a binary you download. Fifty developers is a five-figure annual difference before anyone negotiates.
On the total, less obviously. Somebody has to patch the host, keep backups, restore from one, and answer the message on a Saturday when a push hangs. On modest hardware Gitea and Forgejo are genuinely light, which makes that job small but never zero.
The version most teams should cost out is a managed European instance: the same software, run by somebody whose job it is, in a jurisdiction you chose on purpose. That usually lands between the two numbers and removes the argument about who gets paged.
Which one to pick
If you are replacing GitHub across a whole organisation and are willing to pay for that in rewritten pipelines, GitLab is the only thing here that covers the same ground, and running the Community Edition on your own European infrastructure is what makes it an answer rather than a change of logo.
If the goal is to be out quickly with the automation intact, Gitea is the shortest path, because its Actions implementation reads the workflow files you already have. Forgejo is the same landing under a German non-profit rather than a commercial vendor, and is worth a look before you commit.
If the code is open source, Codeberg is the better home for it than any enterprise arrangement, and it is the one option on this page that does not ask you to make the repository private in exchange for a European address.
And if none of this survives contact with your compliance requirements, buy GitHub Enterprise with data residency knowingly: note in the decision that public repositories and gists go away with Enterprise Managed Users, and that the supplier is still a US company whichever region you pick.
Frequently Asked Questions
GitLab if you want one platform covering repositories, pipelines and scanning and are willing to rewrite your workflows. Gitea if the fastest, smallest landing is what matters and you want your Actions YAML to keep working.
Codeberg if the code is free and open source and you would rather be served by an association than by a vendor. SourceHut if your team already lives in the terminal. The right answer depends on which GitHub you are replacing, not on which country you prefer.
Yes, through GitHub Enterprise Cloud with data residency on a ghe.com address, with EU, Australia, US and Japan regions, and the EU option covering the Azure regions in Norway and Switzerland. It requires the GitHub Enterprise plan, and the enterprise runs on Enterprise Managed Users, which means no public repositories and no gists for anyone inside it.
Microsoft, which completed the acquisition on 26 October 2018 for $7.5 billion in stock. GitHub, Inc. still operates from San Francisco as a subsidiary. Thomas Dohmke announced on 11 August 2025 that he would step down as chief executive at the end of that year, and no direct replacement was announced with it.
The Free plan covers unlimited public and private repositories with community support. Team is $4 per user per month and adds protected branches, multiple reviewers and Codespaces access. Enterprise starts at $21 per user per month, with the rate on GitHub's own pricing page quoted for the first twelve months, and adds SAML single sign-on, the audit log API, enterprise policy controls and the option of data residency on GHE.com.
On Gitea and Forgejo, largely yes: both implement GitHub Actions workflow syntax, so triggers, jobs, steps and environments usually carry over and you point a runner at the new host. Marketplace actions are the exception, because not all of them work and some assume GitHub.com is reachable. On GitLab the pipelines are rewritten in GitLab CI, and on Codeberg you move to Woodpecker CI.
No, and this is the most common misunderstanding about it. Codeberg's terms of use open the service to projects covered by a free and open source software, hardware or culture licence. Private repositories are allowed for the things a free software project needs — secrets, internal discussion, work not yet published — and explicitly not as personal cloud storage or as a home for proprietary products.
Mirror the repository back to GitHub and say plainly in the README where patches are accepted. Discoverability, stars and the habit of a million developers live on github.com, and a European forge does not inherit them. Projects that move quietly and leave a stale mirror behind lose drive-by contributions first and regular contributors second.
It is a reason to decide deliberately rather than by default. Copilot is bought per user and lives in the editor, which means it is a separate purchase from where the repositories are hosted, and none of the European forges on this page ships an equivalent of its own. If your team depends on it, treat the assistant and the forge as two decisions rather than one: the subscription can continue while the authoritative repository moves.
The repositories are an evening, because a mirror clone carries branches, tags and history intact. The pipelines are the project: a week for a handful of straightforward workflows, a quarter for an estate with reusable workflows, matrix builds, self-hosted runners and OIDC trust to a cloud account. Issues and pull request history can be imported by API, and the imported comments will not look exactly as they did.
Who worked on this review
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