When to pick which

Forgejo is a soft fork of Gitea that the Codeberg community started in 2022 after Gitea was reorganised under a for-profit company. Eighteen months on, the two codebases are still wire-compatible — same docker image footprint, same migration UI, same admin paths — and the day-to-day experience is genuinely indistinguishable. The split is governance, not features. Pick Gitea if you want the project that ships fastest and has the broader plugin ecosystem; the company behind it (Gitea Ltd) puts more full-time engineering hours in, and Gitea Actions has been catching up to GitHub Actions parity at a faster pace. Pick Forgejo if your organisation has a policy preference for community-led open source — universities, public-sector deployments, projects that already host on Codeberg — or if you remember the BSL drama at HashiCorp / Elastic / Redis and want to pre-empt the same risk. Either way the migration cost between them is near-zero (Forgejo can read Gitea's database directly), so the real question is which governance model you'd prefer to depend on for the next five years.