Honestly, they're both very good, and any discussion of this is going to be almost bordering on opinion and little else. Here are a few potential downsides: -

Honestly, they're both very good, and any discussion of this is going to be almost bordering on opinion and little else. Here are a few potential downsides: - The 'kool kids' tend to use brew -- so sometimes you end up with packages that are not in the ports ecosystem. That said, the total number of ports is, I believe, about 4x larger than brew's formulae. But take that number with a pinch of salt. - Every time you upgrade the OS (e.g. 10.14 to 10.15) you need to effectively reinstall ports. This sounds hard, but it isn't -- it's also well documented [1]. It's because they link against various OS-specific foundations. - Very rarely you run into apt-style "dependency hell". This has only happened to me once or twice in ~15 years of using it, and is easily fixed. The upsides: - All that being said, it's rock stable - The documentation is excellent - It doesn't come with google analytics by default (unlike brew -- which is opt-out, I should say) - Macports retains the entire dependency tree of a package and offers both source and binary builds A more detailed comparison could be found e.g. here: https://saagarjha.com/blog/2019/04/26/thoughts-on-macos-package-managers/ https://saagarjha.com/blog/2019/04/26/thoughts-on-macos-pack... [1] https://trac.macports.org/wiki/Migration https://trac.macports.org/wiki/Migration