Here’s the Deal

Chocolatey vs Ditto

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When comparing Chocolatey vs Ditto, the Slant community recommends Chocolatey for most people. In the question“What are the best power user tools for Windows?” Chocolatey is ranked 2nd while Ditto is ranked 20th. The most important reason people chose Chocolatey is:

Chocolatey has a massive community package repository of installs (more than 4,000 packages), and its open nature allows everyone to contribute more as needed.

Specs

No specs yet!

Approximate size15 MiB

Initial release2003-08-11

PlatformsWindows XP/Vista/7/8/10/11

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best power user tools for Windows?

Pros

Pro
Large number of applications/utilities available

Chocolatey has a massive community package repository of installs (more than 4,000 packages), and its open nature allows everyone to contribute more as needed.

Pro
Sieg

Installs silently without crapware.

Pro
Easy to use

Just open powershell and type choco install firefox to install Firefox, or choco install java to install Java.

Pro
Straightforward install process

To install Chocolatey simply copy the text from their site and paste it into either cmd.exe or powershell.

Pro
Upgrade all software with one command

choco upgrade all is like Windows Update for all of your 3rd party software. ... or for the more succinct command use 'cup' !!

Pro
Downloaded files are verified by checksums

Chocolatey requires checksums by default for files downloaded over non-secure locations and highly recommends it for HTTPS/SSL locations. It is moving towards requiring checkums by default for downloading from secure locations.

Pro
Manages the entire software lifecycle

From install to upgrade to uninstall, Chocolatey manages the whole process.

Pro
Scriptable

You can put Chocolatey install commands into your powershell scripts.

Pro
Free and open source

It's licensed under Apache License 2.0 with source code available on GitHub.

Pro
Decentralized package sources

Packages can be installed from multiple sources, including private sources.

Pro
Builds on technologies you know

Unattended installation and PowerShell.

Pro
GUI available

There's a package called ChocolateyGUI that can be installed and lets you use Chocolatey with a UI frontend.

Pro
Integrates with almost every configuration management / infrastructure automation / RMM tool

Chocolatey integrates with almost every infrastructure automation tool out there.

Pro
Support and features available for organizations

There is a business edition available for organizations that need more support. The business edition also includes a Package Synchronizer, Package Internalizer, Package Builder, and a host of other features.

Pro
Can be extended with PowerShell

Chocolatey allows installing extension packages that add PowerShell functions to your package automation scripts.

Pro
More Selection

It has programs that can't be found in scoop or ninite.

Pro
Custom sources

It has ability to add custom sources.

Pro
It's reliable, fast and quick

It just works...always. It's fast and quick, which can save you thousands of hours.

Pro
Very configurable

You can set all sorts of things from size of database to size of individual clips, types of objects to copy/paste, which hotkeys to use etc.

Pro
Scriptable clips

Clips can be used/changed with scripts during copy or paste.

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Cons

Con
Sometimes hard to know which package to install from community package repository

The community repository contains multiple packages with similar names, making it hard to know which one to install. This is of course only related to using Chocolatey with the community repository, and you can look up the number of downloads to see which are the most widely used.

Con
Some package installs aren't good or polished or don't install well

Macrium downloads the online installer, 7-zip doesn't associate files, PotPlayer is outdated, etc.

Con
Unable to easily change your install directory in the free version

In the free version you must know the native installer switches and pass them through with install args. In the paid versions you have a ubiquitous install directory option where Chocolatey determines how to properly pass that to the underlying native installer.

Details on the differences.

Con
Buggy

Slow, many packages fail to install, and config can corrupt causing it to not be able to manage packages anymore, leading to a bunch of installed and non-updateable software

Con
Incomplete and conflicting package options

Not enough maintenance done to package library so there are different similarly-named or -versioned packages available, some broken and some not.

Con
Can not download asynchronously

Con
No support for ARM64

Users with Windows on Arm can't install native ARM64 binaries. Apps installed with Chocolatey run slower and need more resources on Windows on Arm because they have to be emulated.

Con
Uploading packages can be time consuming

It can take weeks to have a package accepted and with a fair amount of resubmitting for the dev/ maintainer.

Con
Doesn't care about supporting the community

They used the community to make it the largest repository of packages. Now that they're the de facto standard package manager, they only care to support those that pay them and refuse to fix problems with popular packages.

Con
Uninstaller removes nothing

After uninstalling removal of almost every file manually from different directories is still necessary since the actual uninstaller only displays "other files still remain".

Con
Minimizes after each paste

You have to activate it twice to paste twice.

Con
Does not support HDPI displays

On high DPI/resolution displays, the UI is very small. Practically unusable.

Con
RTF bug is still present in latest Beta version

You can turn on the option to draw RTF text in the clip list, but it no longer works in Windows 10 Ditto (64bit), and the latest Beta version available today - which claims to have fixed the bug - still has the same bug. It will no longer draw RTF text as-is in the clip list.