Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Flox VS MacPorts

Compare Flox VS MacPorts and see what are their differences

Flox logo Flox

Manage and share development environments with all the frameworks and libraries you need, then publish artifacts anywhere. Harness the power of Nix.

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.
  • Flox Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-03-15
  • MacPorts Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-29

Flox videos

A high ponytail in a wig!? Yes, please! Trying on the Flox Hair Sport Pony Wig.

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Flox Pony Wig - Review & How To Wear
  • Review - Flox Syandana Review

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 Flox and MacPorts)
Developer Tools
75 75%
25% 25
Front End Package Manager
Software Development
100 100%
0% 0
Package Manager
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Flox 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 should be more popular than Flox. 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.

Flox mentions (2)

  • Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager
    Flox is the best thing I know of for articulating binary dependencies (language runtimes, etc.), which is probably the sweet spot for nix anyways at the moment. Flox uses nix for its backend, but has a simple TOML syntax and is properly humble about what it can do -- but killer at it -- as opposed to promising the world. https://flox.dev. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • Nix is a better Docker image builder than Docker's image builder
    Nix and NixOS are in something like the state git was in before GitHub: the fundamental idea is based on more serious computer science than the status quo (SVN, Docker), the plumbing still has some issues but isn’t worse, and the porcelain and docs are just not there for mainstream adoption. I think that might have changed with the release of flox: https://flox.dev, it’s basically seamless (and that’s not... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

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 / almost 2 years 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: about 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 Flox and MacPorts, you can also consider the following products

devenv - Fast, Declarative, Reproducible, and Composable dev envs

Homebrew - The missing package manager for macOS

Podman - Simple debugging tool for pods and images

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 .

DevBox - Everyday utilities for the everyday developer

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