From [1] "Forgejo was created in October 2022 after a for profit company took over the Gitea project."

Forgejo became a hard fork in 2024, with both projects diverging. If you're using it for local hosting I don't personally see much of a difference between them, although that may change as the two projects evolve.

[1] https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/

I'm not OP, but; Forgejo is much lighterweight than Gitlab for my usecase, and was cited as a more maintained version of Gitea, but that's just anecdote from my brain and I don't have sources, so take that with a truckload of salt.

I'd had a gitea instance before and it was appealing insofar as having the ability to mirror from or to a public repo, it had docker container registry capability, it ties into oauth, etc; I'm sure gitlab has much/all of that too, but forgejo's tiny, tiny footprint was very appealing for my resource-constrained selfhosted environment.

GitLab is slow as fuck and the UI is cluttered with corporate nonsense.