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Homebrew vs Nix

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Homebrew
553
485
+ 1
2
Nix
180
92
+ 1
0
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Homebrew vs Nix: What are the differences?

Developers describe Homebrew as "The Missing Package Manager for macOS". Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple didn’t. Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local. On the other hand, Nix is detailed as "*A package manager for Linux and other Unix systems *". It makes package management reliable and reproducible. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks, side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package, multi-user package management and easy setup of build environments.

Homebrew and Nix belong to "Package Managers" category of the tech stack.

Homebrew and Nix are both open source tools. Homebrew with 18.6K GitHub stars and 4.15K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Nix with 2.57K GitHub stars and 453 GitHub forks.

Broadly, Feather Direct, LLC, and King's Digital Lab are some of the popular companies that use Homebrew, whereas Nix is used by RELEX Solutions, Grafted-In, and Chill Code. Homebrew has a broader approval, being mentioned in 9 company stacks & 63 developers stacks; compared to Nix, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.

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Pros of Homebrew
Pros of Nix
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    Clean, neat, powerful, fast and furious
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    What is Homebrew?

    Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple didn’t. Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local.

    What is Nix?

    It makes package management reliable and reproducible. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks, side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package, multi-user package management and easy setup of build environments.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Homebrew?
    What companies use Nix?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Homebrew or Nix.
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    What tools integrate with Homebrew?
    What tools integrate with Nix?

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    What are some alternatives to Homebrew and Nix?
    pip
    It is the package installer for Python. You can use pip to install packages from the Python Package Index and other indexes.
    npm
    npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.
    Anaconda
    A free and open-source distribution of the Python and R programming languages for scientific computing, that aims to simplify package management and deployment. Package versions are managed by the package management system conda.
    Chocolatey
    It is based on a developer-centric package manager called NuGet. Unlike manual installations, It adds, updates, and uninstalls programs in the background requiring very little user interaction.
    Composer
    It is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.
    See all alternatives

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