Software Alternatives & Reviews

Snapcraft VS MacPorts

Compare Snapcraft VS MacPorts and see what are their differences

Snapcraft logo Snapcraft

Snaps are software packages that are simple to create and install.

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.
  • Snapcraft Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-12
  • MacPorts Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-29

Snapcraft videos

Snaps and snapcraft.io explained in 3 minutes

More videos:

  • Review - SnapCraft Review
  • Review - ZombieV Game Review SnapCraft

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 Snapcraft and MacPorts)
Front End Package Manager
Developer Tools
82 82%
18% 18
Package Manager
53 53%
47% 47
Windows Tools
64 64%
36% 36

User comments

Share your experience with using Snapcraft 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, Snapcraft seems to be a lot more popular than MacPorts. While we know about 87 links to Snapcraft, we've tracked only 5 mentions of MacPorts. 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.

Snapcraft mentions (87)

  • Tools for Linux Distro Hoppers
    Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Setting Up for Java on Linux.
    My personal favourite IDE for java is Intellej Idea. Apart from not demanding the extra extension, It was designed special for Java and Java related languages so it runs java smoothly with great compilation time. So lets install it. Make sure you have snap before installing it. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Why is Linux so hard and anti GUI?
    Linux Mints App Store is full of GUI programs, Snap Store ist full of it, Flathub is full of it. Source: 5 months ago
  • This might seem dumb but where tf does snap put the actual files and stuff?
    You are being lazy. But I recommend bringing your ass directly to snapcraft.io and reading those documents in the Learn section!! Source: 5 months ago
  • Flutter 3 on Devuan 4: Getting started
    Besides, there may be other ways to install them, although there doesn't seem no such Flatpak packages in Flathub. For example, some senerio to use some release channel or Docker / Podman. Additionally, when you use a different Linux distro where systemd is adopted and therefore can do Snaps (Snapd), you have another possibility. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
View more

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 Snapcraft and MacPorts, you can also consider the following products

Flatpak - Flatpak is the new framework for desktop applications on Linux

Homebrew - The missing package manager for macOS

FLATHUB - Apps for Linux, right here

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 .

NixOS - 25 Jun 2014 . All software components in NixOS are installed using the Nix package manager. Packages in Nix are defined using the nix language to create nix expressions.