Mamba vs Nala
Mamba
mamba.readthedocs.ioNala
gitlab.comSide by side
| Figure | Mamba | Nala |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Package Managers | 8.8 (#9) | 8.0 (#39) |
| Platforms | Mamba runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux, including ARM64 and PPC64LE; installation instructions also cover macOS Silicon. | The installation wiki describes packages for Debian and Ubuntu, plus Debian and Ubuntu based distributions; it says Ubuntu 18.04, Debian Buster, and older are not officially supported. |
| Purpose | Mamba is a fast, robust, cross-platform package manager that manages conda environments. | Nala is a command-line front-end for libapt-pkg, currently being rewritten in Rust on top of rust-apt. |
| Security behavior | By default, Mamba warns and prompts for confirmation when a transaction involves packages with link scripts, which can execute arbitrary operations on the system. | Package-changing commands require root privileges; Nala checks for root, shows planned changes before committing, and records applied transactions. |
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.