Mamba vs Shards
Mamba
mamba.readthedocs.ioShards
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Mamba | Shards |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · Package Managers | 8.8 (#9) | 7.4 (#74) |
| Lockfile support | Yes | Yes |
| Platforms | Mamba runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux, including ARM64 and PPC64LE; installation instructions also cover macOS Silicon. | The Crystal install page lists Shards in package instructions for Linux, macOS, Windows tooling, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. |
| Purpose | Mamba is a fast, robust, cross-platform package manager that manages conda environments. | Shards is a dependency manager for the Crystal language. |
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.