How Kod compares

Typical cost

Kod is free for all use cases, private or commercial. No per-seat pricing, no feature gates, no "contact sales" tiers. You pay for the server you run it on — often a $5–10/month VPS — and that's it.

GitHub is free for public repos and small teams, but advanced features (Actions minutes, security scanning, SSO) push you to $4–21/user/month. For a 20-person team, that's up to $5,000/year.

GitLab SaaS starts free but the Premium tier ($29/user/month) is where most teams land. Ultimate is $99/user/month. A 20-person team on Premium pays nearly $7,000/year.

GitLab self-hosted (Community Edition) is free, but the infrastructure isn't. Expect $50–200+/month for a server beefy enough to run it, plus your time maintaining it.

Gitea / Forgejo are free and self-hosted. Infrastructure costs are low (similar to Kod), though you still need to maintain the instance.

Jenkins is free software, but the infrastructure and maintenance costs add up fast. Plugin management, security patching, and scaling build agents are ongoing expenses — in time if not in money.

Hardware requirements

Kod is a single ~60KB binary. It needs Node.js 24+ on Linux or macOS. No databases, no containers, no message queues, no background services. It runs comfortably on the smallest VPS you can buy.

GitHub and GitLab SaaS run in the cloud — you don't manage hardware, but you also don't control it.

GitLab self-hosted is the heavy end of the spectrum. The official recommendation is 4+ CPU cores, 8GB+ RAM, and you'll need PostgreSQL, Redis, and optionally Prometheus, Grafana, Sidekiq workers, and more. Many teams report needing 16GB+ RAM for comfortable operation.

Gitea / Forgejo are lightweight for what they offer. A single-core VM with 512MB–1GB RAM will get you started. They use SQLite by default, so no external database is required out of the box.

Jenkins needs at least 2 cores and 2GB RAM for the controller, plus separate agents for builds. Java is required. In practice, most Jenkins setups consume far more than the minimums.

Setup & maintenance

Kod installs in one command and starts with one command. There's no database to configure, no admin dashboard to set up, no plugins to install. Updates are a binary swap. The maintenance burden is close to zero because there's almost nothing to maintain.

GitHub and GitLab SaaS win on setup — sign up and you're running. But you're also locked into their update schedule, their UI changes, and their outages.

GitLab self-hosted is notoriously heavy to maintain. Upgrades require careful version-by-version migrations. Background jobs, certificate rotation, backup configuration, and monitoring are ongoing work. Many teams dedicate part of an engineer's time to GitLab upkeep.

Gitea / Forgejo are straightforward to set up (single binary + optional config) and relatively easy to maintain. Upgrades are usually smooth. A good middle ground if you want more features than Kod but less weight than GitLab.

Jenkins is infamous for maintenance. Plugin compatibility issues, Groovy pipeline debugging, security patches, and agent management consume real engineering time.

Feature scope

This is where honesty matters most. Kod does two things: Git repositories and sequential workflows. That's it. No pull requests, no issues, no wikis, no package registries, no built-in code review.

If you need those things, Kod is not the right tool. GitHub and GitLab are full platforms with thousands of features. Gitea gives you a solid GitHub-like experience self-hosted. Jenkins has a plugin for nearly everything.

But here's the thing: many teams don't need all that. If you practice trunk-based development, pair programming, or simply prefer lightweight processes, you don't need pull requests. If you track work in a separate tool, you don't need built-in issues. Kod is for teams who want to remove the platform tax, not add more platform.

What Kod does, it does well: encrypted secrets, scoped tokens, collaborator management, workflows that run identically locally and on the server — all without a single dashboard.

Sovereignty & data control

With Kod, your code never leaves your server. There are no analytics, no telemetry, no phone-home behavior. You own everything.

GitHub stores your code on Microsoft-owned infrastructure in the US. GitHub Copilot's training data policies have been controversial. For regulated industries or teams in the EU, this can be a compliance concern.

GitLab SaaS is better — they offer data residency options and are transparent about their architecture — but your data still lives on their infrastructure.

GitLab self-hosted, Gitea, Forgejo, and Kod all give you full sovereignty. The difference is in what you have to operate to get it. GitLab self-hosted means running a complex stack. Gitea/Forgejo is moderate. Kod is the least operational burden for full sovereignty.

Jenkins runs on your infra too, but it's CI/CD only — you still need a Git host somewhere.

Migration ease

Moving to Kod is straightforward: create a repo, add Kod as a remote, push. Your Git history comes with you. Workflows need to be rewritten in Kod's TOML format, but they're simple enough that this is usually a quick task.

Moving away from Kod is equally simple. Your repos are standard Git. Clone them, push to the next host. No proprietary metadata or lock-in.

GitHub and GitLab make it easy to import repositories, but migrating away means leaving behind issues, PRs, CI configs, wikis, and integrations. The more you use, the harder it is to leave.

Gitea / Forgejo support importing from GitHub/GitLab including issues and PRs. Migration in and out is reasonable.

Jenkins pipelines are notoriously hard to migrate. Groovy-based Jenkinsfiles, shared libraries, and plugin-specific syntax create deep lock-in.

Main value proposition

Every tool in this comparison optimizes for something different. Picking the right one means knowing what you optimize for.

Kod optimizes for speed, simplicity, and sovereignty. It's for developers and teams who want Git and CI/CD without the platform. No dashboards, no bloat, no vendor lock-in.

GitHub optimizes for ecosystem and network effects. It's where open source lives, where developers have profiles, and where integrations are abundant.

GitLab optimizes for the complete DevOps lifecycle. One tool from planning to monitoring. Powerful, but complex.

Gitea / Forgejo optimize for a lightweight, self-hosted GitHub-like experience. A good balance of features and simplicity.

Jenkins optimizes for extensibility. If you need a CI/CD tool that can do anything via plugins, Jenkins is unmatched — but you pay in maintenance.