When comparing MacPorts vs DaisyDisk, the Slant community recommends DaisyDisk for most people. In the question“What are the best power user tools for macOS?” DaisyDisk is ranked 7th while MacPorts is ranked 54th. The most important reason people chose DaisyDisk is:
While working on your Mac you create and download a lot of files, but rarely delete anything. As time goes by you have less and less room for your data. DaisyDisk finds those hidden unused gigabytes.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Provides a consistent experience across OS X versions
MacPorts eschews Apple-supplied libraries and links sources against its own making sure that the experience is the same regardless of what OS X version is used.
Pro Nice variants system
MacPorts has a variants system that allows customizing builds with author provided options.
Pro Generally very up to date
MacPorts generally gets new software soon after it's available. This way users will not have to worry if their software is up to date.
Pro MacPorts is a native application: C + TCL
No need to install Ruby, or any other programming language.
Pro Fast
Written in Tcl & C, it's generally significantly faster than the competition. Tcl is also quite readable and comparable to Ruby, so it's also friendly to newcomers.
Pro Has many more packages than its competitors
As of this writing, 20K packages. 3 to 5x more than other current package managers.
Pro Helps find and delete files taking up HDD space
While working on your Mac you create and download a lot of files, but rarely delete anything. As time goes by you have less and less room for your data. DaisyDisk finds those hidden unused gigabytes.
Pro Awesome visualization of files on drive
DaisyDisk gives you a perfect overview of all the disks connected to your Mac, be it Macintosh HD, flash card, Thunderbolt disk or network storage. And does it in a beautiful way.
Cons
Con Bad at limiting dependencies
MacPorts has a habit of pulling very specific versions of dependencies for each package. It downloads different version of already existing dependencies even in cases where the existing dependency version would have worked seamlessly.
Con Requires root permissions (sudo) for installation of packages
Con Downloads unneeded libraries duplicating functionality already provided by Apple's libraries
As MacPorts eschews Apple-supplied libraries and links sources against its own a large duplication of functionality across MacPorts and Apple libraries can be found.
Con Expensive for how often it is used
Con Calculation based on 1000 not 1024
It's nice to have a base 1000 (MB, GB, …) calculation but it should be optional. Default should be 1024 (MiB, GiB, …)