mise vs SDKMAN!
mise
mise.jdx.devSDKMAN!
sdkman.ioSide by side
| Figure | mise | SDKMAN! |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · Runtime Version Managers | 7.7 (#12) | 7.2 (#22) |
| Spec score · Development Environment Managers | 7.6 (#31) | 7.1 (#45) |
| Purpose | mise manages development tools, environment variables, and project tasks through a project configuration file. | SDKMAN! manages multiple Software Development Kits on Unix systems. |
Plans
In their own words
mise
mise is a free, MIT-licensed open-source tool for managing development runtimes, command-line tools, environment variables, and project tasks from a configuration file. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows and lists a registry of more than 1,000 tools. Projects can pin tool versions and share those choices with teams and continuous-integration systems. Configuration can load variables from dotenv files, secrets, and shell commands. Tasks can define build, test, lint, and other commands with dependencies and arguments, with task graphs, affected-build handling, and remote caching listed. The bootstrap command can declare packages, dotfiles, repositories, and services for machine setup. Shell hooks cover bash, zsh, fish, nushell, PowerShell, and other shells. Documentation describes GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Xcode Cloud use. Community plugins are listed for Emacs, IntelliJ, Neovim, and VSCode, with support depending on editor, extension, and language. Security controls include trust settings, safe and paranoid modes, checksums, signatures, provenance, and artifact attestations.
SDKMAN!
SDKMAN! is a command-line interface and API for managing Software Development Kits in the JVM ecosystem. It supports languages and tools including Java, Scala, Kotlin, Groovy, Ant, Gradle, Grails, Maven, SBT, Spark, Spring Boot, and Vert.x. From the CLI, users can install, uninstall, list, inspect, switch, upgrade, and set default SDK versions. A project can record its versions in an .sdkmanrc file, with automatic switching available when entering its directory. Java distributions are obtained through the Foojay DISCO API. SDKMAN! works on macOS and Linux; Windows use requires WSL or MSYS with MinGW, since it does not run natively there. Cygwin is no longer supported. The installer requires curl, zip, and unzip, and works with Bash and ZSH. Its CI mode answers prompts, disables colored output, and turns off self-updates. SDKMAN! is free, open source, and Apache 2.0 licensed. Security updates are provided only for the latest released CLI version. The project says Go, Rust, Node.js, Python, and Ruby toolchains are outside its intended scope.