Software Alternatives & Reviews

MacPorts VS Pacman

Compare MacPorts VS Pacman and see what are their differences

MacPorts logo MacPorts

The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.

Pacman logo Pacman

Pacman was developed to be the package manager for Arch Linux, and is also used by KDE-focused Chakra Linux.
  • MacPorts Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-29
  • Pacman Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-24

MacPorts videos

Linux Tools for your Mac. Package Management. HomeBrew, MacPorts, Fink

More videos:

  • Review - Install and Testing MacPorts on an M1 Mac
  • Review - Installing MacPorts on macOS Catalina

Pacman videos

No Pacman videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to MacPorts and Pacman)
Front End Package Manager
Developer Tools
21 21%
79% 79
Package Manager
47 47%
53% 53
Windows Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Pacman should be more popular than MacPorts. It has been mentiond 8 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

MacPorts mentions (5)

  • Need help with running OpenBSD on VirtualBox
    Brew & macports have libvirt & virt-manager that are used to manage qemu via GUI. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Brew Is a Bad Neighbor
    Or instead of all this, try MacPorts[0], which in my experience has 99% of what you need. The biggest drawbacks are less support from quite niche packages (the ones that sets up its own homebrew tap), and a bit slower updates. But then I found it bearable much more than homebrew’s downsides. [0]: https://macports.org. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • How to prevent WireGuard from starting up (menubar) on MacOS?
    You can install wireguard-go and wireguard-tools (or boringtun, which is Cloudflare's userspace implementation) using either MacPorts or Brew. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Newbie Problem with MacOS Terminal Stuff
    That being said, I'm going to assume that you're working on MacO. Flatpaks aren't going to be an option, that's only going to work if you're using Linux (like Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch, Mint, and so on). If you need to install HandBrake, you may want to consider using macports.org, or brew.sh, these are projects that provide additional libraries and packages for MacOS, this way you can install additional... Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Top 10 trending github repos of the week🚽.
    On macOS you can also install the latest release with MacPorts:. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago

Pacman mentions (8)

  • How to build Software as a Service (SaaS) Notes application with mySQL/MariaDB and Apache in 300 lines of code
    Install Vely - you can use standard packaging tools such as apt, dnf, pacman or zypper. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Podman 4.3 on Artix Linux: Fix initialization issues
    It is not so difficult to install Podman on Artix Linux, based on Arch Linux and systemd-free. It's because pacman brings core packages: podman and qemu-base of QEMU. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Podman 4.3 on Artix Linux: Install
    Thanks to their package management system, pacman delivers Podman with a simple command line. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Pacman Wrapper for C++/Node
    Pacman is a front-end to libalpm ((library for Arch Linux Package Management) which is written in C, so you should be able to use the library from C++. See https://archlinux.org/pacman/ for information and links to the source code. Source: about 2 years ago
  • (Part 3) I have a base Artix (OpenRC) TTY installed in this VM, whatever you tell me to do, I will gladly accept. As long as it's creative.
    Also, the previous commenter said to do so without the Arch Wiki, they said nothing about man pages, the git documentation, or the Pacman homepage at https://archlinux.org/pacman/. Source: about 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing MacPorts and Pacman, you can also consider the following products

Homebrew - The missing package manager for macOS

Conda - Binary package manager with support for environments.

pkgsrc - pkgsrc is a framework for building over 17,000 open source software packages.

Homebrew Cask - Install with ease. Your software is just one command away from being ready and raring to go. Forget all about babysitting the install process step by step, from website to cleanup. ls /usr/local/Caskroom google-chrome .

Yay - Yay is an AUR helper written in go, based on the design of yaourt, apacman and pacaur.

Portage - Portage is source-based package manager used by Gentoo and its descendants. It controls all process from fetching source through building it, installing into clean environment to "merging" with already installed software.