Credit: Coralnes / ShutterstockBy many measures, GitHub is as popular as ever. One new user joins every second, the service hosts over 600 million repositories, and nearly one billion commits were made in 2025.
But scratch the surface, and something else is going on. Some users are concerned about a range of issues, from technical problems like frequent downtime to the service’s political direction, especially since it was taken over by Microsoft.
A few high-profile projects have taken things much further, abandoning the offering altogether, in a move that may represent the beginnings of a more widespread exodus.
Some key players have abandoned GitHub
A slow trickle that may gain momentum
When you’re searching for open-source software, it can seem like every project is hosted on GitHub. Even the Linux kernel source code has a read-only GitHub mirror, although its main home has a domain of its own.
But this isn’t always the case, and it may become less and less so if moves by a handful of projects become a wider trend.
Probably the highest-profile departure so far has been Ghostty, a cross-platform terminal emulator. The project’s maintainer, Mitchell Hashimoto, announced in April 2026 that Ghostty was leaving GitHub, although not immediately:
It’ll take us time to remove all of our dependencies on GitHub and we have a plan in place to do it as incrementally as possible. We plan on keeping a read-only mirror available on GitHub at the current URL.
Zig, a system programming language that’s a spiritual successor to C, also announced its departure, back in November 2025. The project made its first commit back in 2015, and enjoyed an uninterrupted run on GitHub, until recently.
Another significant project that’s made a switch is Tenacity. This cross-platform audio editor announced its move on a Reddit forum in 2023 and now only maintains a mirror presence on GitHub.
Alongside these more prominent repos, many other projects have migrated, such as the Dillo web browser and the Hare programming language. Even more were never on GitHub in the first place, choosing to self-host their repositories, like GNOME or Apache’s vast array of software.
Projects have left for these key reasons
Downtime, artificial intelligence, and politics are all concerns
Maintainers have given various reasons for moving away, including these:
- Technical quality: probably the most common complaint is that GitHub suffers from frequent outages. IncidentHub tracked a total downtime of 112 hours across 48 “major outages” in the year from May 2025, noting that such outages were the driver behind the migrations of Ghostty and Zig.
- Politics: Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, mentioned GitHub’s relationship with ICE in passing. The company’s $200k deal with the immigration agency was also criticized by employees way back in 2019.
- AI: Still a divisive topic, artificial intelligence has touched almost every aspect of our tech lives, including GitHub, where Copilot is being increasingly integrated. The service nailed its colors firmly to the mast in 2025, when CEO Thomas Dohmke commented, “Either you embrace AI, or get out of this career.”
Complaints about GitHub are probably best summarized by another quote from Mitchell Hashimoto:
It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn’t want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn’t want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn’t want me to ship software.
Aside from these departures, those projects that have always avoided GitHub have their own reasons. The GNU Project, for example, has always been fiercely ideological and rejects GitHub because it requires non-free software (JavaScript) to run. It also notes the host’s encouragement of “bad licensing practice.”
Alternatives to GitHub are doing well
From self-hosting to Codeberg, various options are available
Codeberg is probably the singular most popular competing service that projects like Zig have chosen to abandon GitHub for. It has many of the same features as GitHub: issue tracking, static page hosting, and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), for example.
There are other options, such as GitLab, which has a self-hosting option, or Bitbucket, GitHub’s most contemporary alternative.
Sourcehut is a completely open-source offering, with equivalents of GitHub’s core features and an emphasis on an email-based workflow. Others choose to host their own forge, with popular options including Gitea and Forgejo, the software that runs in the background at Codeberg.
There are even whole movements encouraging people to give up GitHub, like the Software Freedom Conservancy’s campaign, which has many resources to help you make the move.
GitHub can be great, but it’s not your only option
Although it’s probably done more than any other web app to encourage open source development and collaboration, GitHub isn’t without its problems. Some are technical, some are more idealized, but whatever your stance, it’s good to know that alternatives are available.
