I selfhost gitlab for years now. My preffered road.

There's only a couple of missing features (for me, anyway) if you self host compared to the premium licensed self-hosted version (which, insanely, is the same price as the SaaS product!):

* CODEOWNERS

EDIT: Not true anymore! -- ~ * Protected branches (IE; preventing people committing to master/main) ~

* Approval Rules in merge requests

* Merge trains (auto-merging if another merge request depends on another).

* Viewing Jira issues in Gitlab

Merge trains would be nice, protected branches definitely exist.

Never missed the other features tbh

Protected branches is no longer premium-only.

I did a quick Slack bot that messages a channel with open merge requests every morning. I really wanted to show the approval status, too, just as a reminder for someone to go "oh, that's approved, I should go merge".

But the entire approval-related API fields are deliberately removed on free tier, not just the web UI "require approval" functionality. I found this to be pretty heavy handed, especially for a self-hosted instance.

Not trying to excuse the behavior but from what I've heard talking to other SaaS vendors... self-hosted is often priced similarly to the SaaS offering because even though the hosting costs are paid by the customer the support costs are often much higher.

I'm sure the hosting costs are a rounding error for Gitlab for the vast majority of ("cloud") customers. Knowing how big some repos are, storage is probably their biggest cost... and, coincidentally enough, they charge for that a la carte!

If you need the features in the Premium offering, you still have to purchase licensing.

How does Gitea compare? Likes/dislikes?

Also, did you ever look into Gogs?

Gitea had issues a few years back with mirroring many repositories at once, deadlocking and remaining that way until it was reinstalled, essentially. It led me to believe it's not the most stable software but I would imagine it's improved quite a lot over the years.

It is extremely simple and easy to set up, though, and works well as both a private as well as a publicly hosted instance out of the box, depending on how you configure it.

> I've generally moved from Gitlab to Gitea + Drone.

Do you use actions with Gitea? If so - how does drone fit in with/replace nektos/act?

Actions are mostly still in beta with 1.19, disabled by default.

In general, one big thing that's been mentioned is that our actions don't currently support things like services (among other things), so while they are good for a quick CI, they aren't quite ready to replace a full CI system yet.

Thank you - just set up some simple tests leveraging postgres - so I guess we can't jump to gitea w/actions just yet. Still, I'd never had guessed the feature-gap was this close. Exciting!