Software Alternatives & Reviews

Portage VS MacPorts

Compare Portage VS MacPorts and see what are their differences

Portage logo 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.

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.
  • Portage Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-26
  • MacPorts Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-29

Portage videos

Nursing video 2 portage learning, prerequisite courses

More videos:

  • Review - THOROGOOD 1892 PORTAGE Series #814-6522 [ THE BOOT GUY REVIEWS ]
  • Review - Thorogood Portage Boots Review in Indigo Chromexcel

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Portage and MacPorts)
Package Manager
43 43%
57% 57
Front End Package Manager
Developer Tools
64 64%
36% 36
Windows Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Portage and MacPorts. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, MacPorts seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 5 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.

Portage mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Portage yet. Tracking of Portage recommendations started around Mar 2021.

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: about 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: over 1 year 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

What are some alternatives?

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

Conda - Binary package manager with support for environments.

Homebrew - The missing package manager for macOS

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

Pacman - Pacman was developed to be the package manager for Arch Linux, and is also used by KDE-focused Chakra Linux.

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.