Hex vs Mamba

Hex is a package manager for the BEAM ecosystem, including Elixir and Erlang. Its services include an HTTP API, a website, a package and index repository, HexDocs, Mix integration, and other components. Packages work with Mix, Rebar, and erlang.mk, and the site provides usage guidance for Gleam. Developers can fetch dependencies without creating an account.

Organizations can publish and retrieve private packages and manage which users can access them. Free organizations can publish public dependency policies; paid organizations can make policies private and apply them to public and private packages. A private package can depend only on packages in its organization’s repository and the global hexpm repository. Documentation explains how to build and serve a repository on infrastructure an organization operates. Hex supports organization authentication keys for CI, and its source code is licensed under the Apache 2 License. The Open Source plan is free. Private Packages are listed at $9 / user / month, with an annual option at $90 / per user / per year. Enterprise pricing is by contacting sales. Hex lists API, self-hosted, and web platforms.

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.