Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Homebrew VS Cygwin

Compare Homebrew VS Cygwin and see what are their differences

Homebrew logo Homebrew

The missing package manager for macOS

Cygwin logo Cygwin

Cygwin is a set of tools that provide Linux and POSIX functionality to Windows.
  • Homebrew Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-29
  • Cygwin Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-27

Homebrew videos

Homebrew Review: Coopers Lager - Taste Test

More videos:

  • Review - Homebrew Review | Alchemist Class by Mage Hand Press (featuring Designer Mike Holik)
  • Review - Northern Brewer Cream Ale Homebrew Review Tasting

Cygwin videos

Cygwin Review Part 1: Running Linux programs... on Windows?

More videos:

  • Review - Cygwin Review Part 2 - it didn't quite go to plan, again!
  • Review - What is Cygwin? | How does Cygwin work?

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Homebrew and Cygwin)
Front End Package Manager
SSH
0 0%
100% 100
Windows Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Server Management
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Homebrew and Cygwin. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Homebrew and Cygwin

Homebrew Reviews

Top Homebrew Alternative: ServBay Becomes the Go-To for Developers
Homebrew is a highly popular package manager on macOS and Linux systems, enabling users to easily install, update, and uninstall command-line tools and applications. Its design philosophy focuses on simplifying the software installation process on macOS, eliminating the need for manual downloads and compilations of software packages.
Source: medium.com

Cygwin Reviews

10 Termux Alternatives
Cygwin is open-source software with a collection of GNU and provides all functions similar to the Linux shell environment on windows. This software also has the functionality of API manager that has premium packages to have complete control on your files and move them to other software based on your requirement. This app also has the functionality of editing different files...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Homebrew seems to be a lot more popular than Cygwin. While we know about 888 links to Homebrew, we've tracked only 10 mentions of Cygwin. 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.

Homebrew mentions (888)

  • Next.js 14: App with OpenAI API Integration
    Node.js and npm: These are essential for building Next.js and React applications. You can download Node.js from the official website or use a package manager like Homebrew. - Source: dev.to / 2 days ago
  • Add album art to music files via the command line
    The below was all run on a mac. Command line tools where installed using brew . I suggest making a backup of your files before running any scripts against them. - Source: dev.to / 6 days ago
  • How I configured YubiKey to sign and decrypt emails on Mac
    We need some software on Mac to make this work. The process should be similar on Linux. Assuming you have brew installed, we will install the following packages:. - Source: dev.to / 9 days ago
  • Mike McQuaid on 15 years of Homebrew
    This week we’re talking to Mike McQuaid, project leader and longest tenured maintainer of Homebrew, a package manager for macOS and Linux used by tens of millions of developers worldwide. After ten years at GitHub, Mike is now CTO of Workbrew, a startup for managing a fleet of machines running Homebrew. Mike spoke with us from Edinburgh, Scotland. - Source: dev.to / 9 days ago
  • Ask HN: What macOS apps/programs do you use daily and recommend?
    - Raycast (https://www.raycast.com/) there's also a free version, I just prefer to support the author with a Pro purchase. - Homebrew (https://brew.sh/) - Visual Studio Code - SyncThing (https://syncthing.net/) - Fantastical (https://flexibits.com/fantastical) - MonitorControl (https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl#readme). - Source: Hacker News / 18 days ago
View more

Cygwin mentions (10)

  • Groovy 🎷 Cheat Sheet - 01 Say "Hello" from Groovy
    Alternatively, you can use sdkman. A great tool to install your Software Development Kit. The downside is that it only works on *nix systems. So for Widnows users, you will have to use WSL or Cygwin as the official page suggests. It is really simple to use sdkman. After a successful installation, just type those commands into your *nix shell:. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • How do you even get started programming in c++ on Windows?
    You could try Cygwin. I never leave home without it. Source: about 1 year ago
  • What exactly IS gitbash?
    It's launching MSYS2, which is in turn based on cygwin, which is a collection of common Linux utilities built for windows and an incomplete POSIX abstraction layer. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Kind of an obvious design flaw
    IME, not really? Git for Windows or MSYS2 are both pretty solid. I used Cygwin for years, but MSYS2 seems to integrate a bit more smoothly (plus MSYS uses pacman instead of Cygwin's fiddly gui for package management). Source: over 1 year ago
  • WSL - Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using a ton of memory?
    Try Cygwin or Msys2, they are not running virtual machines. For Bash and Neovim only you probably don't want to run a whole virtual machine. Source: almost 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Homebrew and Cygwin, you can also consider the following products

Chocolatey - The sane way to manage software on Windows.

MobaXterm - Enhanced terminal for Windows with X11 server, tabbed SSH client, network tools and much more

iTerm2 - A terminal emulator for macOS that does amazing things.

PuTTY - Popular free terminal application. Mostly used as an SSH client.

Visual Studio Code - Build and debug modern web and cloud applications, by Microsoft

PowerShell - Download WMF. Windows Management Framework contains the latest versions of PowerShell, DSC, WMI, and WinRM for older versions of Windows. PowerShell Module Browser. Search for PowerShell modules and cmdlets.