Best alternatives to args in 2026

GitHub works, but it's also grown into a sprawling platform bolted onto by a decade of features, ads for GitHub Copilot, and a business model increasingly built around AI training on the code you host there. args (formerly branded gitdot) is a young, Rust-built alternative that strips that back down to a fast, private git host with a code-review workflow built around stacked diffs instead of GitHub's flat pull-request model, aimed at developers who think of code as something worth doing carefully rather than shipping fast and iterating later. Under the hood it's a hyper-performant git server plus a CI/CD platform designed to be locally testable and reproducible — meaning you can run the same checks on your laptop that run in CI, instead of debugging pipeline failures blind. End-to-end encryption for the git protocol is on the roadmap but not shipped yet, and the team is explicit that code hosted on args is never sold or used to train AI models, which is a direct jab at where GitHub's Copilot data comes from. All public repositories are free today; a paid tier for private team repos is planned but not yet priced, and the project is pre-seed funded, which buys it some runway to build out before it needs to monetize.