If you don’t need CI/CD I don’t see any reasons to choose Gitlab over gitea. But I’m still testing gitea so take my words with a grain of salt :)

At work we selfhost gitlab (paid) and I’m checking gitea for my own projects. They have a good comparison table at https://docs.gitea.com/installation/comparison

Do you also need CI/CD?

I’m happy it helped.
I tried many systems (paperless and it’s derivatives as well) and I found docspell is a lot easier to use and has all the features I need.

• I can archive emails by moving them to a category and docspell converts it to pdf and saves it to the database.
• I can choose a file system storage or a database storage. I chose database storage (Postgres, which is also the default) because is a lot easier to backup)
• I love the way I can categorize the files by adding recipient and sender. That way I can filter all the files related to a specific person.
• I can export all the files in a filter to a zip file.
• I can batch edit.

That as a summary :)

My only recommendations are

• to deploy it using a tag in docker and not using automatically the latest version. That way you are in control of the updates.
• And always do database backups :) (using a tag in docker means you can always redeploy a specific version.

I use docspell and I find it great. I run it on VM on an old microserver running proxmox.

There is also Mayan edms based on Django, but it has to many features for my use case.