About Nitehub
Nitehub is a community-driven, for profit software development platform operated by the Nitehub Corporation and centered around Nitehub, a modified fork of Gitea.
Our Story
Nitehub was initially created to be a privacy-friendly and cheaper alternative to services like GitHub (opens in a new tab) and GitLab (opens in a new tab) by Nitehub Org. (opens in a new tab) founder, C-EO (opens in a new tab) on November 27, 2022. Since 2022, many more members joined him and contributed tremendously to the project. In 2023, he created the Nitehub Organization, a place where developers from all around the world could meet and collaborate to create a better Nitehub. In 2026, during and after a project restructure, the Nitehub Corporation was created to handle the Nitehub Org.'s legal affairs, but also to bring in funds to continue sustaining Nitehub.
Our Mission
The development of Free Open Source Software is experiencing an unbroken boom, due to the general availability of the internet and the resulting social network effects, multiplying communication, exchange of ideas, and productivity each month.
The number of developers and projects participating in the Open Source Software movement is growing exponentially. Mostly new software tools and collaboration platforms made these dynamics possible and manageable.
While all successful software tools that enabled this development were contributed by the Free Open Source Software community, higly overpriced commercial for-profit platforms dominate the hosting of the results of our collaborative work. This has led to the paradox that literally millions of volunteers create, collect, and maintain invaluable knowledge, documentation, and software, to feed closed platforms driven by commercial interests, whose program is neither visible nor controllable from outside.
Considering the fate of formerly successful startups like SourceForge, we need to break the circle and avoid history repeating.
The mission of Nitehub Org. is to build and maintain a cheap collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process.
Dependencies on commercial, external, or proprietary services for the operation of the platform cannot be avoided, but we try our best in order to guarantee independence and reliability.
Read more at Nitehub's initial announcement (opens in a new tab) and the licensing article.
What You Can Do
On Nitehub, you can develop your own Free Open Source Software (opens in a new tab) projects, contribute to other projects, browse (opens in a new tab) through inspiring and useful free open source software, share your knowledge or build your projects a home on the web using Nitecel®, just to name a few.
Comparisons: Nitehub vs. Gitea
Gitea (opens in a new tab) is a self-hostable free software for software development, built on top of Git. Nitehub was once powered by Gitea. Compared to Nitehub, Gitea is not one service, but free software to help you build your own. Everyone can install their own Gitea instance to host their own projects. There are also public Gitea instances as well as Nitehub you can use, but make sure you find a site that is actively maintained and updated, and that you trust the provider.
The official Gitea instance at Gitea.com (opens in a new tab) is only meant for development of Gitea and related products and not public use!
People are often asking why they should use Nitehub over Gitea. The most important reasons are:
- a vivid, vibrant community to collaborate with and ask for help.
- active maintenance through the community and shared effort to provide an awesome experience
- you are able to take part in operation and decisions, and ideally donate
- we add additional services like Nitecel
Comparisons: Nitehub vs. GitHub & GitLab
GitHub (opens in a new tab) is a software collaboration platform created and maintained by GitHub, Inc. GitLab (opens in a new tab) is the same, but is operated by GitLab, Inc. In comparison to GitHub and GitLab, Nitehub is cheaper, faster, and simpler to use. Like GitHub & GitLab, Nitehub provides services like Actions, Nitecel - alternative to GitHub and GitLab Pages, and more. Nitehub can integrate to multiple services like Vercel and can provide timely access to more via our Marketplace (opens in a new tab).
Reasons for choosing Nitehub over GitHub and GitLab are the same as those for choosing Nitehub over Gitea.
What is the Nitehub Corporation?
Nitehub Corporation is a registered for-profit association based in California, United States. You don't have to be a member of the association in order to join Nitehub or to contribute to the development of the platform, but if you want, you can join the Nitehub Maintainers team (opens in a new tab) to support the project and build it.
Nitehub members can also take part in the decisions of the platform as explained in the bylaws, and they elect the presidium and board of the platform, thus the Nitehub Corporation can be considered as community-owned.
Alternatives to Nitehub
Nitehub is not the only libre option for hosting Free Open Source Software projects. We don't aim for a vendor-lock-in, but hope you like our space and stay here.
We recommend choosing a shared instance to save time, money and energy, ideally run by a community of people (like Nitehub).
We'll list a few options:
- disroot (opens in a new tab): Public Gitea instance (next to other services) powered by community at disroot (opens in a new tab). Funded by donations.
- SourceHut (opens in a new tab): A minimum-GUI Free Software based service, available as hosted version by a transparent for-profit. Self-Hostable.
- Self-Hosting GitLab Community Edition (opens in a new tab), the software is provided as Open Core (certain features are proprietary) by a for-profit.
To start your journey with Codeberg, let's create an account.
License
The Nitehub Documentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.