Gitea is a perfectly fine lightweight Git hosting platform. However you need external CI/CD, project management and what not; with GitLab that and a lot of other things come included.

So, it will depend on what you need.

How hard is it to set up CI? I know there are open-source CI solutions (Drone, SourceHut) but I don't know how hard they are to install and connect to Gitea. I don't think I'd use a platform with no CI.

Drone ( the only standalone non-SaaS CI system I've used) was easy to install and connect ( it was a matter of 3-4 config options, and a single auth/app creation flow).

It's not that it's hard to setup external CI for something like gittea, it's that GitLab CI works REALLY well and is deeply integrated. I have no doubt that gittea/drone can work, I just doubt it can work as flawlessly as gitlab and be maintained and operated so seamlessly (seriously i've never seen a software package as complex as gitlab be as simple to install/maintain/upgrade over years).

GitLab team member here. Thanks for the kind words. I shared them with our product team. :)

I find the interface of GitHub (and therefore gitea) much more usable than gitlab's. Gitea is also easier and lighter to self-host than gitlab. Gitlab's CI offering is awesome though and really makes it stand out among software forges. Honorable mention towards sr.ht which is very appealing to me because of its lightweight design and usage of email for "PR's" and issues and soon IRC for chat.

> I find the interface of GitHub (and therefore gitea) much more usable than gitlab's

Agreed, we switched from bitbucket to gitlab a few years ago, which was comparably better... but I still get lost in gitlabs interface when compared with github, it feels way too complex for the most common UI pathways. I now try to limit myself to the command line to avoid putting up with the complexity of gitlab UX.

Gitea is cozy, I like to s/Organization/Folder/ in the html templates.