I migrated one of my two GitHub accounts to GitLab a few weeks ago. The move itself had nothing to do with missing features or pricing. It was primarily to try out something else that wasn’t GitHub.

At my job, I spend most of my days on GitHub. When working on my little projects, stepping back into GitHub feels like I am back at work again. With the lines blurring between work and personal coding, I started to think that when I spent time coding on my projects, it still felt like “work”.

So, for one GitHub account, I migrated that account to GitLab. It’s been a great move, and despite being on GitLab’s free tier, I can still match feature for feature what I was paying GitHub for. And when it comes to working with that account, I don’t feel like I am back at my desk.

After the move, I considered moving my other private repositories to GitLab, but GitLab would be more than I needed. It has many great tools for maintaining code bases, but I don’t need them for smaller projects.

I needed something other than GitHub or GitLab.

Enter SourceHut, created by Drew DeVault. SourceHut is a collection of open-source development tools that are a good alternative to GitHub and GitLab.

I’ve been considering using SourceHut for a while, but I have only started seriously considering it in the last couple of weeks.

Today, I created my account and initialised a single repository to get me started. A much more straightforward and basic user interface is strange, but it works. I have become accustomed to the feature-rich user interfaces of GitHub and GitLab. While SourceHut lacks many of the features found in the two bigger platforms, the simplicity of the SourceHut user interface makes it refreshing to use, with just the essentials.

Over the next few weeks, I will migrate more repositories, and then I can demote my GitHub account to be used only for work.