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SPECIFICTION
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Cabal vs Mamba

Cabal

haskell.org

Mamba

mamba.readthedocs.io

Side by side

FigureCabalMamba
Price fromFreeFree
Free planYesYes
Free trial——
Open source——
WindowsYesYes
macOSYesYes
LinuxYesYes
API—Yes
Self-hosted—Yes
Plans published11
Spec score · Package Managers8.6 (#18)8.8 (#9)
InstallationThe Cabal download page recommends obtaining Cabal through ghcup and provides links to manually downloaded binaries for many architectures.The docs recommend installing Mamba through the Miniforge distribution, which comes with conda-forge preconfigured, and also document Miniforge Docker images.
Lockfile supportYesYes
PlatformsThe official overview says ghcup can manage Cabal versions on Linux, Mac, and Windows.Mamba runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux, including ARM64 and PPC64LE; installation instructions also cover macOS Silicon.
PurposeCabal is a system for building and packaging Haskell libraries and programs.Mamba is a fast, robust, cross-platform package manager that manages conda environments.

Plans

Cabal

  • CabalFree

Cabal pricing →

Mamba

  • MambaFree

Mamba pricing →

In their own words

Cabal

Cabal has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.

Visit haskell.org

Mamba

Mamba manages conda environments across Linux, macOS, Windows, API, and self-hosted setups. It creates and activates environments, installs packages, and runs commands inside them. It works with conda packages and supports most conda commands; its parallel downloads and libsolv solver speed package resolution. The framework includes the mamba command-line interface, the libmamba C++ library, micromamba, and Python bindings. Environment creation accepts text, Conda YAML, explicit, and conda-lock YAML specifications, and micromamba can install conda-lock files directly. The repoquery command searches repositories and can display direct, recursive, and reverse dependencies. Environments are self-contained prefixes that can manage native dependencies across programming languages. Mamba documents verification for package archives and extracted files, while repository index verification remains experimental. By default, it warns and asks for confirmation before transactions run package link scripts that can perform system operations. Mamba is free, open-source software under the BSD-3-Clause license, with lockfile support.

Visit mamba.readthedocs.io