Back in the day homebrew allowed you to use system libraries for stuff like openssl while macports did not, which was nice for some things, especially at a time

Back in the day homebrew allowed you to use system libraries for stuff like openssl while macports did not, which was nice for some things, especially at a time when there were no binary ports which meant installing something like imagemagick would take a loooooong time because of all the dependencies. Also brew cask was pretty nice, and generally the experience to add a port was not as seamless as adding a formula to homebrew. I very much prefer macports, anyway.