Heptapod Cloud
Version Control France
Managed GitLab CE fork hosting Git and Mercurial on French servers. Alternative to GitHub.
Details
Heptapod Cloud is a hosted software forge built on GitLab Community Edition, operated and billed by Clever Cloud from French infrastructure. It serves repositories, merge requests, issues, milestones, boards, CI/CD pipelines, a container registry and Pages, and it hosts Mercurial repositories alongside Git with first-class support for the topic and evolve extensions — the only mainstream hosted forge that still does.
Pricing is per active user at EUR 7 a month, with CI runners billed separately. Public free-software projects can be hosted at no cost on foss.heptapod.net. The source is open and can be self-hosted, though prebuilt production container images have required a paid subscription since May 2025.
The Community Edition base sets the boundaries. Protected branches with per-role push and merge access apply to private repositories, where GitHub reserves them for paid plans. The approval-rule engine and CODEOWNERS live in GitLab’s Enterprise tree and are absent, so required reviewers cannot be enforced; secret scanning, SAML single sign-on and cloud development environments are absent for the same reason.
Heptapod was created by Octobus, a French firm whose founder is a long-standing Mercurial maintainer, and is now maintained by Cloudcrane. Releases track GitLab closely; the 19.4 series was tagged in September 2026.
About Clever Cloud
Clever Cloud SAS is a French cloud provider founded in 2010 and registered in the Nantes Trade Register under number 524 172 699, with its registered office at 4 rue Voltaire, Nantes. Co-founder Quentin Adam is président. Its general terms name the company as the operator of the platform and place the contract under French law with jurisdiction at the courts of Nantes.
The company is revenue-funded rather than venture-backed and runs its own Paris datacenter alongside capacity from other European providers. It holds ISO 27001, the French HDS certification for health-data hosting, and operates a SecNumCloud-track offering, with on-premises and air-gapped editions for customers who cannot use a public platform.
