I haven’t looked much into the differences, but from my brief research, it appears that Forgejo has just recently updated such that migration from Gitea is no longer possible. I knew that they had become a “hard” fork last year but it has now diverged.

From a feature standpoint, I know that Forgejo is working on Fediverse integration. Beyond that, I think the differences are less apparent.

So to answer your question, I use Gitea and have for a long time. They’ll still remain MIT-licensed even if it’s no longer fully open source. However, the owning company can (and may) cease open source development. If I had known of Forgejo breaking away earlier, or if I were a new user, I would have probably started with Forgejo. That’s my recommendation.

To my knowledge, there is 1 feature that forgejo has that gitea doesn't: it can generate a new ssh key for you at the click of a button that can be used to push repo changes to another git forge.

I have several personal repos on my forgejo instance that are each setup so that they mirror themselves onto my Codeberg account at noon every day.

I also have a gitea instance on a raspi on my local network that itself will push out changes on certain repos to the (public-facing) forgejo instance.

I can push and/or pull to any of the three origins as needed, but usually I just push to the gitea when I'm at home and the forgejo when I'm not, and let the mirroring take care of propagating changes to Codeberg.

Forgejo is a fork from gitea that is made for us. Forgejo is the new gitea.

There was some licensing or something, some kind of disagreement I don't recall. Forgejo is the one that is still free and open source.