Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Gitea VS GitHub Desktop

Compare Gitea VS GitHub Desktop and see what are their differences

Gitea logo Gitea

A painless self-hosted Git service

GitHub Desktop logo GitHub Desktop

GitHub Desktop is a seamless way to contribute to projects on GitHub and GitHub Enterprise.
  • Gitea Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-20
  • GitHub Desktop Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-02

Gitea features and specs

  • Open Source
    Gitea is open source, allowing users to freely inspect, modify, and contribute to its codebase. This fosters transparency and community-driven development.
  • Lightweight
    Gitea is designed to be lightweight, making it easy to run even on resource-limited systems. This makes it ideal for self-hosted environments.
  • Easy Installation
    Gitea offers a straightforward installation process, making it simple for users to get up and running quickly without complex setup procedures.
  • Rich Feature Set
    Despite being lightweight, Gitea provides a robust feature set, including issue tracking, pull requests, and continuous integration support, which covers the majority of use cases.
  • Active Community
    Gitea has an active and growing community, which contributes to its development and provides support through forums, documentation, and tutorials.
  • Customizable
    Gitea allows for extensive customization through configuration options and extensions, enabling users to tailor the platform to their specific needs.
  • Self-Hosting
    Users have full control over their repositories and data when self-hosting Gitea, which enhances privacy and security compared to third-party hosting services.

Possible disadvantages of Gitea

  • Limited Enterprise Features
    Gitea may lack some advanced enterprise features found in other platforms like GitHub Enterprise or GitLab, such as advanced permissions management and extensive integrations.
  • Smaller Ecosystem
    Compared to larger platforms like GitHub, Gitea has a smaller ecosystem of plugins and integrations, which may limit certain functionalities.
  • Community Support
    While Gitea has an active community, it lacks the formal, professional support options available from larger commercial services, which might be a drawback for businesses seeking guaranteed support.
  • Learning Curve
    New users may experience a learning curve when transitioning to Gitea, especially if they are accustomed to other platforms with different workflows and interfaces.
  • Scalability Concerns
    For very large projects or organizations, Gitea may face scalability issues, as it is designed to be lightweight and may not handle extremely large loads as well as some competitors.
  • Update Management
    Users are responsible for managing Gitea updates and server maintenance when self-hosting, which requires additional administrative effort compared to cloud-hosted solutions.

GitHub Desktop features and specs

  • User-Friendly Interface
    GitHub Desktop offers a clean, intuitive GUI that simplifies the Git process, making it accessible for beginners and less technical users.
  • Seamless GitHub Integration
    The application is tightly integrated with GitHub, allowing users to easily clone repositories, create branches, and submit pull requests directly through the desktop interface.
  • Cross-Platform Support
    GitHub Desktop is available on both Windows and macOS, offering a consistent experience across these major operating systems.
  • Simplifies Workflow
    Features like drag-and-drop to add files, visual diff tools, and easy branching help streamline the workflow for users.
  • Collaborative Features
    The app provides useful collaborative tools such as reviewing changes, creating requests, and viewing history, enhancing team productivity.

Possible disadvantages of GitHub Desktop

  • Limited Advanced Features
    While GitHub Desktop is great for basic tasks, it lacks advanced features found in other Git clients like GitKraken or the command line.
  • Dependency on GitHub
    The app is deeply integrated with GitHub, which can be limiting for users who want to interact with repositories hosted on other platforms like GitLab or Bitbucket.
  • Performance Issues
    Some users report performance issues when dealing with large repositories or a significant number of files, which can hinder productivity.
  • Customization Limitations
    GitHub Desktop offers limited customization options compared to other Git clients or the command line, which may be a drawback for power users.
  • Offline Limitations
    Certain features of GitHub Desktop require an internet connection to interact with GitHub, limiting its usability in offline scenarios.

Gitea videos

GITEA REVIEW ⭐ TUTORIAL 👨 RUN YOUR OWN GIT SERVER 💻 $50 FREEBIE 💰

More videos:

  • Review - Migrate to a Microsoft Github Alternative: Gitea
  • Review - Gitea - Git with a cup of tea - Installation and Configuration

GitHub Desktop videos

GitHub Desktop 2.0 -- Easy Mode Version Control

More videos:

  • Review - GitHub Desktop Quick Intro For Windows
  • Tutorial - Git and GitHub for Beginners: GitHub basics, and how to use GitHub Desktop

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Gitea and GitHub Desktop)
Code Collaboration
50 50%
50% 50
Git
43 43%
57% 57
Software Development
74 74%
26% 26
Git Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Gitea and GitHub Desktop

Gitea Reviews

The Top 10 GitHub Alternatives
Gitea is a painless self-hosted all-in-one software development service that includes Git hosting, code review, team collaboration, package registry, and CI/CD. It is similar to GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab. Gitea was forked from Gogs originally and almost all the code has been changed.
Top 7 GitHub Alternatives You Should Know (2024)
Gitea is a lightweight, fast, and reliable DevOps platform providing development teams with essential version control and collaboration features. k
Source: snappify.com
Let's Make Sure Github Doesn't Become the only Option
The Pull Request workflow is so dominant now that it’s considered the default path for code to permanently enter into a repository. You can see a similar features in GitHub’s smaller competition Codeberg, GitLab, BitBucket, and Gitea. These competitors don’t offer other, major code collaboration tools, and their Pull Request-like features aren’t just there to help users come...
Gitea - Alternative to GitLab and GitHub
There are still plenty of things you might want centralized on a server somewhere, but it seems like a lot of the value add of GitHub, GitLab, and now Gitea is in making git repos easier to manage and interact with.

GitHub Desktop Reviews

Best Git GUI Clients of 2022: All Platforms Included
Creating branches and switching to existing ones isn’t a hassle, so is merging code with the master branch. Furthermore, you can track your changes with GitHub Desktop. Check out our detailed guide on how to use GitHub for more detailed information.
Boost Development Productivity With These 14 Git Clients for Windows and Mac
GitHub Desktop is the global standard for working with Git-related tasks in a graphical user interface (GUI). It is an open-source tool and hence completely free to use for all sorts of projects. It is available for both Windows and macOS desktops and laptops.
Source: geekflare.com
Best Git GUI Clients for Windows
GitHub Desktop is, perhaps, the most famous solution for working with Git in a visual interface. It is familiar to all developers keeping their repositories on GitHub (Git repository hosting service used for version-controlling IT projects). This free Git GUI is open-source, transparent, and functional. When you consider the Git graphical interface for Windows, GitHub...
Source: blog.devart.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, GitHub Desktop should be more popular than Gitea. It has been mentiond 135 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Gitea mentions (60)

  • Beware Offers of “Help” with Your Projects
    This reminds me of Gogs [0], where the original author refused a lot of good ideas and improvements, eventually leading to a fork [1] that's now a lot more popular and active than the original. [0] https://gogs.io/ [1] https://gitea.io/en-us/. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Incident with Issues and Pull Requests
    Yes, we do this using https://gitea.io/en-us/ on a private server. Firewall, backups and a replica running for most projects. Github is only used when it's required by a stakeholder. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Let's Make Sure GitHub Doesn't Become the Only Option
    There's a number of places out there, some of which also support alternatives to Git itself. By no means a complete list and in no particular order: GitLab - https://about.gitlab.com/ Sourcehut - https://sourcehut.org/ Codeberg - https://codeberg.org/ Launchpad - https://launchpad.net/ Debian Salsa - https://salsa.debian.org/public Pagure - https://pagure.io/pagure For self hsoted options, there's these below... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • If you're on DSM 6 and still waiting for an update on the GitLab package, don't bother
    And if you need GitLab (for runner, etc...) then it's not too bad to run in Docker. But if anyone is looking for a somewhat simpler git solution, gitea is pretty great. Source: about 2 years ago
  • OpenBSD Upgrade 7.2 to 7.3
    Check: Configuration and syntax changes and Special packages. The latter includes changes on PostgreSQL, Python and Gitea. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
View more

GitHub Desktop mentions (135)

  • How to Fix the Issue of Not Being Able to View Your GitHub Account on Other Devices
    Download the latest version from the GitHub Desktop website. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • 12 Steps to Organize and Maintain Your Python Codebase for Beginners
    I’m not going to dive into Git commands here — you can find plenty of tutorials online. If you’re not a fan of using the plain terminal CLI, you can also manage repositories with tools like GitHub Desktop or SourceTree, which provide a more visual, intuitive interface. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • File Governance and Versioning in Corticon BRMS
    Using terminal commands isn’t necessary for basic adoption of Git with Corticon Studio files, though. There are various tools that will allow us to bypass the command line when defining rules, including the built-in Eclipse plugin for Git version control. If you’ll be storing your assets on GitHub, though, an even easier solution is GitHub Desktop, a free desktop software that GitHub offers. It can be used in... - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • An Introduction to Nix for Ruby Developers
    Nix currently is akin to git's "porcelain": powerful but esoteric. However, much like git evolved into exoteric, user-friendly tools such as git-flow, GitHub Desktop, and Tower to become user-friendly, many developers are building abstractions, wrappers, and utilities to simplify Nix usage. Let's briefly look at a few of these tools now. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Make your first contribution on github easily
    1.Download the github desktop. 2.Open the first contribution repository. 3.Open the github app and clone the repository. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Gitea and GitHub Desktop, you can also consider the following products

GitLab - Create, review and deploy code together with GitLab open source git repo management software | GitLab

GitKraken - The intuitive, fast, and beautiful cross-platform Git client.

GitHub - Originally founded as a project to simplify sharing code, GitHub has grown into an application used by over a million people to store over two million code repositories, making GitHub the largest code host in the world.

SourceTree - Mac and Windows client for Mercurial and Git.

BitBucket - Bitbucket is a free code hosting site for Mercurial and Git. Manage your development with a hosted wiki, issue tracker and source code.

SmartGit - SmartGit is a front-end for the distributed version control system Git and runs on Windows, Mac OS...