Fossil vs Gitolite: What are the differences?

Developers describe Fossil as "Simple, high-reliability, distributed software configuration management". Fossil is a software configuration management system. Fossil is software that is designed to control and track the development of a software project and to record the history of the project. There are many such systems in use today. Fossil strives to distinguish itself from the others by being extremely simple to setup and operate. On the other hand, Gitolite is detailed as "Setup git hosting on a central server, with fine-grained access control". Gitolite allows you to setup git hosting on a central server, with fine-grained access control and many more powerful features. Gitolite is an access control layer on top of git.

Fossil and Gitolite can be categorized as "Code Collaboration & Version Control" tools.

Some of the features offered by Fossil are:

• Bug Tracking And Wiki
• Web Interface
• Autosync

On the other hand, Gitolite provides the following key features:

• Use a single unix user ("real" user) on the server.
• Provide access to many gitolite users: they are not "real" users, so they do not get shell access.
• Control access to many git repositories: read access controlled at the repo level, and write access controlled at the branch/tag/file/directory level, including who can rewind, create, and delete branches/tags.

Gitolite is an open source tool with 7.45K GitHub stars and 961 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Gitolite's open source repository on GitHub.