MacPorts vs CodeKit

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.

Detailed instructions on the homepage are easy to follow. Official GUI app is also available

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.

MacPorts has a variants system that allows customizing builds with author provided options.

As of this writing, 20K packages. 3 to 5x more than other current package managers.

No need to worry if some rogue app will change your binaries or configuration.

Considering just how often Apple breaks things, any reduplication of of Apple-supplied libraries with the canonical sources is an asset.

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.

Homebrew dropped support for old Macs. MacPorts still supports them.

No need to install Ruby, or any other programming language.

With Apple moving over to its own silicon, macports has been ready for the move to ARM since 2.6.4

Reading the story behind MacPorts, it is the only one that was developed by Apple by an Apple employee. In fact it is the same person that was responsible for creating the FreeBSD port system.

For example, trying to install Finch using Pkgsrc doesn't work, while installing it using MacPorts works perfectly. Finch isn't even on Homebrew's radar.

Everything you need to get a project started is included with CodeKit. Thanks to the professional support, different components of the workflow pipeline are guaranteed to play nicely with each other without you needing to do the research on how to configure them.

More advanced features that may require extra configuration to set up with other workflow wrappers are set up out of the box in CodeKit, like automatic browser updating, linting, and source maps.

CodeKit has a clean and intuitive graphical user interface out of the box. Most other tools in this category run as command line utilities or require unsupported third-party plugins to run with a GUI.

The CodeKit GUI makes it easier to navigate and manage the various components of your project with helpful UIs like dropdowns, and views that provide extra details without having to run a separate command.

CodeKit has live updating built in and will update monitored files across multiple browsers and devices, and refresh CSS without a new page load. Other workflow wrappers have live updating, but they require extra configuration. With CodeKit, everything is set up for you so you can get it up and running in no time at all.

You can navigate your project directory, and use a menu form to set up how it gets compiled without needing to read configuration documentation, or deal with configuration errors. On top of that, file watching and recompilation is built in with no extra configuration needed.

At a one time cost of $29, it's a great deal considering how powerful and easy to use it is.

CodeKit provides a clean GUI for Bower that makes it easier to navigate and get information about modules without having to deal with a command line interface.

You can use it to, for example, live-update server-side PHP by establishing a connection with your local MAMP server.

Autoprefixer automagically adds vendor prefixes based on latest information.

CodeKit provides a powerful tool to automatically reduce the size of compressed images and production web code.

CodeKit supports live compilation of Less, Sass, Stylus, Jade, Haml, Slim, CoffeeScript, JavaScript and Compass including automatic debugging and minification.

Install 6,000+ Bower components with a single click: Bootstrap, jQuery, Modernizr, Zurb Foundation, even WordPress.