HomeBrew VS asdf

Compare HomeBrew vs asdf and see what are their differences.

HomeBrew

🍺 The missing package manager for macOS (or Linux) (by Homebrew)

asdf

Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more (by asdf-vm)
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HomeBrew asdf
1,344 377
43,355 23,450
1.6% 1.8%
10.0 9.4
6 days ago 8 days ago
Ruby Go
BSD 2-clause "Simplified" License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

HomeBrew

Posts with mentions or reviews of HomeBrew. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-04-22.

asdf

Posts with mentions or reviews of asdf. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-04-27.
  • Show HN: A Common Lisp implementation in development, supports ASDF
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Apr 2025
  • Practical Guide to Switching to Linux
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Mar 2025
    This, but here are some things I've learned to do:

    * Use a .local directory under my home directory instead of ~/bin. That's a great prefix when installing from source or tarball at the user level, keeps the top-level of the home directory from getting cluttered with /share /lib /include /etc /lib etc. etc.

    * Reach for the package manager first when installing new software, unless there is a good reason not to. It makes keeping things up-to-date easy, and since I use Arch, which uses a rolling release, you pretty much get the latest stuff.

    * If I can't get what I want from the package manager, I'll look at what is available using asdf-vm (https://asdf-vm.com/), and failing that, build from source or install from tarball.

    * I don't use snap or the like.

    I gave up on Windows over 20 years ago, and I can't say enough how liberating it has been. One of the nicest things is that there is a distro for almost every need (see https://distrowatch.com/). I use Arch; but your use case may point to a beginner-friendly distro, such as Mint, Ubuntu, etc., or a repeatable install type of distro, such as NixOS or Guix, or many others.

  • Setting Up a Powerful Windows Development Environment 💪
    4 projects | dev.to | 13 Feb 2025
    # Download asdf git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf --branch v0.15.0 # Add the following to ~/.zshrc . "$HOME/.asdf/asdf.sh" # Optional: Completions are configured by either a ZSH Framework asdf plugin # or by adding the following to your .zshrc: fpath=(${ASDF_DIR}/completions $fpath) autoload -Uz compinit && compinit
  • Asdf v0.16.0 – Rewrite asdf in Golang
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2025
  • Asdf Is Rewritten in Go
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2025
  • mise vs. asdf for JavaScript project environment management
    5 projects | dev.to | 2 Jan 2025
    asdf is a popular version manager that uses a technique called "shimming" to switch between different versions of tools like Python, Node.js, and Ruby. It creates temporary paths to specific versions, modifying the environment to ensure that the correct version of a tool is used in different projects. However, this method can introduce performance overhead due to how these shims work.
  • Emacs 2024 Changes
    11 projects | dev.to | 1 Jan 2025
    I use asdf and direnv to manage my toolchain at the project level, so to improve the integration with Emacs I installed envrc.
  • Asdf soon to release go rewrite
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Dec 2024
  • Ruby 3.4.0 Released
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Dec 2024
    Use asdf (https://asdf-vm.com/) to manage your Ruby versions.

    You should be able to do

    $ asdf plugin add ruby

    $ asdf list all ruby (you'll see 3.4.1, the latest is available)

    $ asdf install ruby 3.4.1

    And now you can use Ruby 3.4.1 with no issues. Follow that up with

    $ gem install bundler

    $ gem install rails

    $ rails new ...

  • Rust on a $5 dev board
    4 projects | dev.to | 12 Dec 2024
    The toolchain can be installed via Rustup, or (my preferred way) using asdf.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing HomeBrew and asdf you can also consider the following projects:

spack - A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.

SDKMan - The SDKMAN! Command Line Interface

Visual Studio Code - Visual Studio Code

nix - Nix, the purely functional package manager

Chocolatey - Chocolatey - the package manager for Windows

mise - dev tools, env vars, task runner

Judoscale - Save 47% on cloud hosting with autoscaling that just works
Judoscale integrates with Rails, Sidekiq, Solid Queue, and more to make autoscaling easy and reliable. Save big, and say goodbye to request timeouts and backed-up job queues.
judoscale.com
featured
InfluxDB high-performance time series database
Collect, organize, and act on massive volumes of high-resolution data to power real-time intelligent systems.
influxdata.com
featured