Migrating from Github to a European alternative
Among the important basic building blocks for building software that are monopolized by the US, I present to you: Github (Microsoft).
Github is much more than a git repository, it's also
- a social network where the open source world fights for stars
- a software factory (Github Actions)
And if we talk about numbers, Github has 180M registered developers, an estimated market share above 50%, with Gitlab (US) and Bitbucket (US-AU) sharing a large portion of the rest.
In short, if you're a developer, you probably have an account on it, to fork open source products, for your own projects or those of your company. The global software economy relies in part on this US actor, which raises some questions. What happens when your software economy relies on a foreign actor if it becomes hostile?
- In 2019, developers residing in Iran, Syria, Cuba, North Korea and Crimea saw access to their private code repositories as well as their paid accounts completely blocked.
- In 2025, 20,000 private Github repositories were indexed by the Bing search engine and accessible for Microsoft Copilot AI.
And broadly speaking, Microsoft/Github is subject to the Cloud Act and FISA, which requires it to provide all this data to the US administration upon request, particularly for threats to national security, which includes the protection of US economic interests. If I translate into simpler terms, you have no guarantee that your code is protected if the US administration decides otherwise.
Fortunately, there are alternatives in Europe, and that's what we're going to talk about today.
Self hosting
The first option is to host open source solutions. In this category we will find many solutions based on gitlab and gitea.
But open source doesn't mean neutrality. These two companies are US-based and can change their terms of service or embed hostile code that triggers based on geolocation. This doesn't prevent forks, but you then have to manage to create a community of developers to maintain it. So I'm dismissing these choices.
For Gitea however, there is already a European fork: Forgejo maintained by the non-profit organization Codeberg.
Forgejo is notably what was chosen by the Dutch administration to host the source code of public administrations.
If you're a fan of self-hosting, Forgejo is presumably the only available solution. However, self-hosting comes with its own drawbacks, maintenance and management of infrastructure. So I propose to look at hosted solutions.
Hosted solutions
On the market of hosted solutions we will find products based on Forgejo precisely, of which the most obvious solution is codeberg.org. But this is a solution reserved for open source projects so not at all suitable for your business needs if you have any.
We could also mention tangled.org, an excellent project born in Finland, one of my favorite finds, which is based on the ATProto protocol. The project is only made for open source today and includes a social dimension by default. But perhaps the arrival of spaces in ATProto will make it usable later for private projects. However, as it stands, for a business project, I cannot recommend it.
I'm completely dismissing all solutions based on managed Gitlab, they're very good solutions but that doesn't satisfy the idea of finding a European solution. On the other hand, for managed Forgejo we can mention:
Beyond that, we can find two solutions that have just emerged and are not based on Forgejo:
Both are in beta with wait list or invite only but I was fortunate enough to test rickub which is becoming my development platform for Writizzy and Hakanai.
Testing Rickub.com
(First game, I'll let you find the reference hidden behind the name)
Comparison
Rickub positions itself as a Github replacement. We find most of what we're interested in on it, private and public repos, CLI, an MCP, Rickub actions (largely compatible with Github actions).
Under the hood, Rickub uses MicroVMs for CI, which is supposed to guarantee shorter startup time, better isolation and faster execution. Which we can verify on the Hakanai API build (3min vs 7min on github):
In terms of interface, we find our bearings quite easily since it takes the habits we can have on Github.
On the migration side, the process was fairly simple. I created a .rickub/workflows/deploy-api.yml file. It's the same format as Github action but with some subtleties that are described in the CI/Actions documentation and in the migration documentation.
One thing I particularly liked is that test reports are native without having to go through an external plugin.
And that, believe it or not, is really nice. I would love in the future to have a historical dimension to know since which build a test fails or if certain execution times increase, if there are flaky tests etc… But all in due time, the product just came out.
Pricing
On the pricing side, we find a free plan that allows you to have 5 private repos, 500 CI minutes and 50 AI reviews (I didn't use this feature).
It's very good for many personal uses. It's a bit less generous than Github which offers unlimited private repos and 2000 CI minutes. But for CI, I would say that the gap should be measured knowing that Rickub's CI is faster. 500 min for side projects is more than enough.
Then you have paid plans. I chose the €3/month plan to benefit from 3000 CI minutes, much more than what I need, and here it's slightly cheaper than Github which charges the equivalent of €3.50/month (4 dollars).
In any case, I don't really care, this amount is relatively painless in my case, and here I'm buying the fact that I'm no longer the product as on Github, and that I'm favoring EU products. Yes, tech has a price, some products have accustomed us to being free by appropriating our data and creating a monopoly. €3, I pay them without problems to get out of that.
Open source repos
I partially migrated for Bloggrify but in this case, the final decision to fully migrate hasn't been made yet.
Github is also, and even mainly, a social network. An open source project on Github has more ease because most people have an account there, so they can contribute easily. Most open source project evaluations are based on the number of stars, stars that we find on aggregators.
For example, the position of Bloggrify on jamstack.org depends on the number of stars on Github.
Similarly, there are robots that crawl Github to read projects related to a given tag, that's how Bloggrify was listed by certain sites in the past.
So already on this dimension, it's complicated to get rid of Github. So I left a mirror replication between the two but I'm not sure it's very cool to manage issues and PRs on two systems at the same time.
But beyond that, for now, rickub doesn't handle OIDC id-tokens which allow you to publish packages on NPM, which prevents me from automating my Bloggrify releases on NPM.
Conclusion
Bottom line, I migrate without any regret for Hakanai and Writizzy. It's probably less obvious for open source projects. For professional/business use, I consider Rickub to be very promising and well deserves our attention. I imagine that not everything is perfect yet but that's precisely with use that the product will improve.
And if you're in Europe and you're still using US products, now's the time to start thinking about exit doors before it's too late…
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!