Managed hosting from
£25/month +VAT
Small resource profile: 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 10 GB SSD storage. Typically suits development teams of up to a few dozen engineers. Deployment, upgrades, daily backups, monitoring, SSL and UK hosting included, with no per-user fees. How our pricing works
Your code is your business. Host it like it.
Source code is the most concentrated intellectual property most companies own, yet the default is to rent space for it on someone else's cloud and pay per developer for the privilege. Gitea is a lightweight open source git service with repositories, issues, pull requests and CI, self-hosted so your code stays on UK infrastructure you control. Node deploys, manages and supports Gitea as a production service, with no per-user fees as the team grows.
What Gitea is
Gitea is an open source git hosting platform that covers the workflow developers expect from GitHub or GitLab: repositories with pull requests and code review, issues, labels and milestones, wikis, releases, webhooks and organisation-level team permissions. It also includes a package registry for common formats and Gitea Actions, a built-in CI/CD system whose workflow syntax is compatible with GitHub Actions.
What sets Gitea apart is how little it demands. It is written in Go, ships as a single lightweight service and runs comfortably on modest hardware, which makes it one of the most efficient ways to run a complete, private software forge. Teams that have used GitHub feel at home within the hour; the interface and the pull request workflow are deliberately familiar.
Gitea is genuinely open source and community-run, so there is no vendor with a paid tier to steer you towards and no cloud service your code is quietly encouraged to live in.
Why self-hosted Gitea instead of GitHub Team or GitLab SaaS
No per-user pricing: GitHub Team and GitLab's paid SaaS tiers charge per user per month, at the time of writing from around a few pounds per seat for GitHub Team to substantially more for GitLab's higher tiers. Every hire raises the bill. Self-hosted Gitea has no seat count: a flat managed cost however large the team gets.
Private code on UK infrastructure: with SaaS forges your source code sits in a US-headquartered vendor's cloud. Gitea managed by Node keeps repositories, issues and CI logs on UK infrastructure with an Article 28 data processing agreement, a clean position for client contracts, security questionnaires and regulated work.
No feature gating: protected branches, code owners, CI, packages and organisation permissions are all part of Gitea, not rationed across pricing tiers. The features your workflow needs do not depend on the plan you are on.
No lock-in: git is portable by design, and Gitea keeps the rest portable too: issues, wikis and releases live on your infrastructure in accessible formats, and migration tooling moves projects in and out with history intact.
Fast and frugal: Gitea's small footprint means snappy clones, quick page loads and a platform that does not need a fleet of servers to host a company's code.
A complete forge, not just a git server
Gitea's pull request workflow supports the review culture teams already have: branch protection, required reviews, status checks from CI, and merge policies per repository. Issues, labels and milestones keep planning next to the code, and webhooks connect events to the rest of your tooling, including n8n workflows that can act on pushes, releases and review activity.
Gitea Actions runs your CI/CD on runners we manage, using workflow files compatible with GitHub Actions syntax, so build, test and deployment pipelines carry over from GitHub with minimal rework. The built-in package registry handles common formats, keeping build artefacts and dependencies inside the same private platform as the code that produces them.
Keycloak and single sign-on
Every application in a Node tenant joins your organisation's own Keycloak realm on our platform. Developers sign in to Gitea with the same corporate credentials they use across all their Node-managed applications, MFA and session policies are enforced consistently, and when an engineer leaves, removing them from your identity system removes their access to the code immediately.
How Node runs Gitea for you
Deployment: we deploy Gitea in a production configuration with TLS, SSH access, your organisations and permission structure, and CI runners ready for your first pipeline.
Upgrades and maintenance: we test and apply Gitea releases, manage database migrations and keep the platform patched and current without interrupting your developers.
Monitoring and support: we monitor availability, storage growth and CI runner health, take daily backups of repositories and metadata, and our UK team is on hand when the forge needs attention.
Your infrastructure or ours: hosted on Node's UK infrastructure or deployed into your own environment, on-premises or in your cloud accounts, with the same managed service either way.
The economics of per-seat code hosting: SaaS forges bill by headcount, so the cost of hosting your code rises with every engineer, contractor and reviewer you add, and the code itself sits on infrastructure you do not control. A managed Gitea deployment from Node is a flat monthly cost whether you have five developers or fifty, and the repositories live on UK infrastructure you own. Grow the team, keep the price, keep the code.
Adoption and community
56,000+ GitHub stars The Blender Foundation moved its entire development platform, including code review and bug tracking, to self-hosted Gitea in 2023, as documented on the Blender Developers Blog.
“Self hosted gitea for many years with ~25 devs. Yes, it's essentially a FOSS carbon copy of GitHub. CI/CD is also intercompatible, uses the same syntax and pulls the original GitHub Actions packages.”
Hacker News
“gitea runs well on a low end server in my experience. self hosting on hetzner and it's somehow the holy trinity of cheap, fast and reliable”
Hacker News
“Setting up Gitea was honestly just an afternoon of work.”
Hacker News
Quotes are from public community discussions, linked to their original sources.
Frequently asked questions
Where is our source code hosted?
On Node's UK infrastructure, or in your own environment if you prefer. Your repositories never sit in a US hyperscaler's cloud, and the service is backed by an Article 28 data processing agreement, so you have a documented answer on where your intellectual property lives.
Can we migrate from GitHub or GitLab to Gitea?
Yes. Gitea has built-in migration tooling that imports repositories with full history, plus issues, labels, milestones, releases and pull request records from GitHub and GitLab. Node runs the migration, verifies the results and helps your team cut over cleanly.
Does Gitea support single sign-on?
Yes. Every application in a Node tenant joins your own Keycloak realm, so developers sign in to Gitea with corporate credentials alongside all their other Node-managed applications, with MFA enforced and access revoked centrally when someone leaves.
What does the managed Gitea service include?
Deployment in a production configuration, upgrades and security patching, repository backups, monitoring, TLS and domain setup, CI runner configuration and UK-based support. Your team writes code; we keep the platform healthy.
Does Gitea have CI/CD?
Yes. Gitea Actions provides built-in CI/CD using a workflow syntax compatible with GitHub Actions, so many existing workflow files run with little or no change. We deploy and manage the runners as part of the service.
Is Gitea suitable for private and commercial code?
Yes. Gitea supports unlimited private repositories and organisations with granular team permissions, protected branches and audit-friendly access control, which is exactly why firms with sensitive or client-owned code self-host it.
Talk to us about Gitea.
Drop us a line and our team will discuss your development workflow and how a managed Gitea deployment can bring your code onto infrastructure you control.
Our heritage
These projects were delivered by Tokyo Digital, acquired by Node in May 2023 and now a wholly owned subsidiary of Node DT Group. The same team builds and runs the Node platform today.