Assembly Line

Mamba

The Fast Cross-Platform Package Manager

Mamba is an open-source package managers project on GitHub under the BSD-3-Clause license (permissive), with 8.1k stars. It is built with LLVM project and CPython. Its last push was today.

Stars
8.1k
License
BSD-3-Clause
Activity
Active
Latest release
2.10.0

Code on GitHub Website

Judgement

What it is
Developer tool
What it does
A C++ reimplementation of the conda package manager with faster dependency solving and parallel downloads, plus micromamba, a single static binary.
Adopt it when
You use conda environments for data science and want much faster installs, or a small conda binary for CI and containers.
Watch out
conda itself now uses mamba's solver, so the speed gap is smaller, and Pixi is a newer option for project-based workflows.
Ready for
Production-ready
Runs as
Command line
Built with
C++, Python and libsolv
How established
Established: started 7 years ago, latest release 2.10.0.
What the license allows
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Judged on 2026-11-06 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: Mamba → LLVM project → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

Open-source alternatives to Mamba

  1. 1
    Bun oven-sh

    Incredibly fast JavaScript runtime, bundler, test runner, and package manager – all in one

    Developer tool Production-ready You start a new JavaScript or TypeScript project and want fast installs, fast startup and fewer separate tools, and you can test Node compatibility for your dependencies.

    ★ 97k See repository Rust Active, pushed today
  2. 2
    uv astral-sh

    An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust.

    Developer tool Production-ready Starting or modernising a Python project and you want one fast tool in place of pip, pip-tools, virtualenv, pyenv and Poetry.

    ★ 92k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today
  3. 3
    Homebrew Homebrew

    🍺 The Package Manager for Everywhere

    Developer tool Production-ready You use a Mac and want a standard way to install and update developer tools and apps from the terminal.

    ★ 50k BSD-2-Clause Ruby Active, pushed today
  4. 4
    pyenv pyenv

    Simple Python version management

    Developer tool Production-ready Projects on macOS or Linux need different Python versions and you prefer a single-purpose tool over an all-in-one manager.

    ★ 45k MIT Shell Active, pushed 2 days ago
  5. 5
    pnpm pnpm

    Fast, disk space efficient package manager

    Developer tool Production-ready You run JavaScript monorepos or many projects and want faster installs, less disk use and stricter dependency rules than npm.

    ★ 37k MIT Rust Active, pushed today
  6. 6
    mise jdx

    dev tools, env vars, task runner

    Developer tool Production-ready Your team juggles nvm, pyenv, asdf, direnv and make-style scripts and wants one config file that works the same in the shell, the editor and CI.

    ★ 36k MIT Rust Active, pushed today
  7. 7
    Poetry python-poetry

    Python packaging and dependency management made easy

    Developer tool Production-ready You already use Poetry or want an established all-in-one tool for building and publishing Python packages.

    ★ 34k MIT Python Active, pushed 3 days ago
  8. 8
    Composer composer

    Dependency Manager for PHP

    Developer tool Production-ready You write PHP; there is effectively no alternative in that ecosystem.

    ★ 30k MIT PHP Active, pushed today

Stars, license and activity come from GitHub and refresh on a rolling hourly schedule. The project's own description is quoted as written.