conda vs Mamba
conda
conda.ioMamba
mamba.readthedocs.ioSide by side
| Figure | conda | Mamba |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Python Package Managers | 7.8 (#12) | 8.8 (#2) |
| Spec score · Package Managers | 7.8 (#43) | 8.8 (#9) |
| Environment portability | Conda can create environments from environment files and supports lockfiles to recreate resolved environments across Windows, Linux, and macOS, depending on package availability. | Mamba environments are self-contained prefixes and can manage native dependencies across many programming languages. |
| Lockfile support | Yes | Yes |
| Platforms | The conda site lists Miniconda and Miniforge installers for Windows x86_64, macOS arm64 and x86_64, and Linux x86_64 and aarch64. | Mamba runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux, including ARM64 and PPC64LE; installation instructions also cover macOS Silicon. |
| Purpose | Conda provides package, dependency, and environment management for any language. | Mamba is a fast, robust, cross-platform package manager that manages conda environments. |
Plans
In their own words
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.