gitlab.com is a for profit service/company. They have an open-source community edition of Gitlab which you can run on your own server. Codeberg is a non-profit association running the open-source software “forgejo” for you. At Codeberg you can become a member and then you can vote for important decisions and make proposals. People also care about ethics there. Nobody cares about profit. Codeberg runs on donations from members. I think some people feel more respected at Codeberg because the governing body of Codeberg is a subset of its users. If Gitlab cares about you, then probably because a bad user experience would be bad for business.

Something not mentioned yet: Forgejo, the software running Codeberg, has a smaller feature set and narrower scope than GitLab (“GitLab is the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform” from their website).

Forgejo is much easier to administrate for smaller groups. For example compare the dependencies mentioned in the Forgejo installation documentation and the Gitlab installation documentation.

1. Codeberg is fully open source(forgejo) while gitlab has an open source core+community edition but a source available propietary enterprize edition.

2. Codeberg is a nonprofit with no ulterior motives. Gitlab is a publicly traded for profit entity with a goal to make profit

3. This could just be me, but codeberg feels a lot more transparent. When they have outages, they explain why.

4. Super minor, but the codeberg team “self-hosts” their own servers so you only need to trust the one entity rather than additionally trusting the server provider.