Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Gitea VS Mercurial SCM

Compare Gitea VS Mercurial SCM and see what are their differences

Gitea logo Gitea

A painless self-hosted Git service

Mercurial SCM logo Mercurial SCM

Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool.
  • Gitea Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-20
  • Mercurial SCM Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-17

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.

Mercurial SCM features and specs

  • Performance
    Mercurial is known for its speed and performance, especially with large repositories and complex histories. It is designed to be fast and efficient, which makes it suitable for large-scale projects.
  • Simplicity
    Mercurial has a simpler command set compared to other SCMs like Git. The straightforwardness of its commands can make it easier to learn and use, particularly for new users.
  • Cross-platform Support
    Mercurial is a cross-platform tool that works well on a variety of operating systems including Windows, macOS, and Linux. This makes it versatile for development teams using different environments.
  • Strong Documentation
    Mercurial offers comprehensive and well-structured documentation which can be very helpful for both beginners and advanced users. The documentation covers a wide range of topics from basics to more complex usage.
  • Branching Model
    Mercurial uses a simpler and more intuitive branching model compared to Git. This can make branch handling more straightforward, reducing the complexity for developers.

Possible disadvantages of Mercurial SCM

  • Smaller Community
    Mercurial has a smaller user base and community compared to Git. This might result in fewer third-party tools, plugins, and resources available for Mercurial.
  • Market Share
    Git has largely dominated the market share for SCM tools. This might make Mercurial less attractive for enterprises and developers who prefer widely-adopted tools with broad industry support.
  • Tool Integration
    Some software tools and services offer better integration with Git than with Mercurial. This can limit the choices for CI/CD pipelines or other development tools that are often built with Git compatibility first.
  • Complex History Management
    While Mercurial’s simpler commands are an advantage, it can make some complex history management tasks more challenging compared to Git, which has a more powerful set of tools for such purposes.
  • Feature Lag
    New features and updates in source control management tend to appear in Git before they make their way to Mercurial, if at all. This lag can be a disadvantage for teams looking to use the latest advancements in SCM.

Analysis of Gitea

Overall verdict

  • Gitea is generally considered a good option for users seeking a lightweight and self-hosted alternative to more resource-intensive platforms like GitLab or GitHub Enterprise. Its ease of use, open-source nature, and flexibility make it an attractive choice for personal projects or small to medium-sized teams.

Why this product is good

  • Gitea is a lightweight, self-hosted git service that's open-source and easy to set up. It's designed to be accessible and simple while offering essential features for project hosting and collaboration. Gitea supports a wide range of platforms and architectures due to its Go-based implementation, and it has a strong community support. It is particularly valued for its low resource usage and its ability to run on minimal hardware.

Recommended for

    Gitea is recommended for developers and teams who prefer self-hosted solutions and need an efficient, uncomplicated git service. It's suitable for small to medium-sized projects where simplicity, low resource requirements, and ease of deployment are key considerations. It's also a good fit for users who want full control over their source code hosting environment.

Analysis of Mercurial SCM

Overall verdict

  • Mercurial SCM is a reliable and effective tool for version control, especially suited for teams and projects that need a straightforward yet powerful system. While it might not be as popular as Git, it excels in areas such as ease of learning and use, making it an excellent choice for developers who prioritize these qualities.

Why this product is good

  • Mercurial is a distributed version control system known for its simplicity, performance, and powerful branching capabilities. It is particularly favored for its ease of use, efficient handling of large codebases, and capability to work well within both small and large teams. Mercurial offers a consistent command-line interface and has robust support for concurrent development, making it a solid choice for many development environments.

Recommended for

  • Teams that need a simple and intuitive interface for version control
  • Projects requiring efficient handling of large or complex codebases
  • Developers new to version control systems who are looking for an easy-to-learn tool
  • Development environments where consistent and clear version control operations are critical
  • Organizations preferring an open-source solution with a strong focus on reliability and performance

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

Mercurial SCM videos

No Mercurial SCM videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Gitea and Mercurial SCM)
Code Collaboration
70 70%
30% 30
Git
68 68%
32% 32
Software Development
100 100%
0% 0
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 Mercurial SCM

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.

Mercurial SCM Reviews

We have no reviews of Mercurial SCM yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Gitea seems to be a lot more popular than Mercurial SCM. While we know about 60 links to Gitea, we've tracked only 2 mentions of Mercurial SCM. 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 / about 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 / about 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

Mercurial SCM mentions (2)

  • Why so rude?
    Many people have asked me to write a blog post on my preference of Mercurial over Git and so far I've refused and will continue doing so for the foreseeable future. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Mercurial Paris Conference will take place on April 05-07 2023 in Paris France. Call for papers are open!
    Mercurial Paris Conference 2023 is a professional and technical conference around mercurial scm, a free, distributed source control management tool. Source: over 2 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Gitea and Mercurial SCM, you can also consider the following products

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

Git - Git is a free and open source version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. It is easy to learn and lightweight with lighting fast performance that outclasses competitors.

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.

Atlassian Bitbucket Server - Atlassian Bitbucket Server is a scalable collaborative Git solution.

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

Apache Subversion - Mirror of Apache Subversion. Contribute to apache/subversion development by creating an account on GitHub.