Self-hosted Git servers put your repositories on hardware you own, from a 512 MB forge with pull requests up to a full DevOps platform that wants 8 GB. Settle that span first, because it is the widest on any hub here: Gogs documents 512 MB, GitLab CE documents 8 GB as its constrained floor and 16 GB as the real baseline, and everything else sits between them. The second question is whether you want a forge at all. Gitea, Forgejo, Gogs, GitLab, OneDev and GitBucket all give you pull requests, issues and a web UI; Soft Serve gives you SSH, a terminal UI and clones, and that is the point of it rather than a gap in it — it is somewhere to push, not somewhere to review code. Then read the licence line twice. GitLab and OneDev are open core, with real features held behind paid tiers, while Gitea, Forgejo, Gogs and GitBucket are not. Governance matters to some readers too: Forgejo is a community hard fork of Gitea, created after Gitea's development moved under a company. And one runtime outlier — GitBucket is a Java WAR you start with java -jar, where everything else here is a container or a single binary.