Laravel Herd vs Nix
Laravel Herd
herd.laravel.com
Nix
nixos.orgSide by side
| Figure | Laravel Herd | Nix |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $8.25/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · Development Environment Managers | 7.9 (#19) | 8.3 (#11) |
| Spec score · Development Environment Management Tools | 7.9 (#12) | 8.2 (#6) |
| Purpose | Herd is a native Laravel and PHP development environment for Windows and macOS. | Nix is a tool for package management and system configuration that supports reproducible, declarative, and reliable systems. |
| Support | Free users can seek community support, while Herd Pro and Teams users can contact email support, with priority email support for Teams. | The project provides community help through its official forum and Matrix space, and lists consulting companies for professional support. |
Plans
In their own words
Laravel Herd
Laravel Herd has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
Nix
Nix is a free package management and system configuration tool for creating reproducible, declarative systems. It builds packages in isolation to avoid undeclared dependencies and help keep builds consistent across machines. Users can define and share development and build environments across projects and languages, install software from URLs or source code, and use virtual machines for integration testing. Nix supports dependency resolution, lockfiles, workspaces and offline installation; its package formats include Nix expressions, derivations and flakes. The Nix Packages collection offers over 140,000 packages. The wider ecosystem supports remote builds and deployments, binary caches, cross compilation, atomic upgrades and rollbacks to earlier package versions. Nix runs on Linux and macOS, and on Windows through WSL2; multi-user Windows installation requires WSL systemd support. Documentation includes guides for GitHub Actions, Docker images, Terraform deployment, SSH provisioning and distributed builds. Nix is aimed at people familiar with command-line interfaces and plain-text editors, including developers, test engineers, DevOps engineers, system administrators, data scientists, students and open-source enthusiasts. It has no paid plan listed.