StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. Front End Package Manager
  5. Chocolatey vs npm

Chocolatey vs npm

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

npm
npm
Stacks137.4K
Followers82.2K
Votes1.6K
GitHub Stars17.6K
Forks3.0K
Chocolatey
Chocolatey
Stacks96
Followers124
Votes0

Chocolatey vs npm: What are the differences?

Chocolatey and npm are package managers designed for different ecosystems. Let's explore the key differences between them.

  1. Installation Process: Chocolatey is a package manager for Windows, while npm is a package manager for JavaScript. Chocolatey focuses on installing and managing Windows software packages, making it easy to automate software installations. On the other hand, npm is primarily used for installing and managing JavaScript packages and dependencies for Node.js projects.

  2. Package Management: Chocolatey allows users to search for and install a wide range of software packages from the Chocolatey community package repository, which includes both open-source and commercial software. It also provides the ability to create, manage, and distribute custom packages. npm, on the other hand, provides access to a massive ecosystem of JavaScript packages and libraries that can be easily installed and managed within Node.js projects.

  3. Dependency Management: Chocolatey provides basic dependency management by allowing packages to specify other packages as dependencies. When installing a package, Chocolatey will automatically install any required dependencies. npm, on the other hand, excels in dependency management, allowing packages to specify precise versions of dependencies and resolving and managing complex dependency trees.

  4. Command-Line Interface: Chocolatey provides a powerful command-line interface (CLI) that allows users to perform a wide range of operations, such as searching, installing, upgrading, and uninstalling packages. It also supports scripting and automation, making it suitable for various use cases. npm also provides a CLI with similar functionalities but is primarily focused on managing JavaScript packages within Node.js projects.

  5. Community Support: The Chocolatey community is active and provides support, documentation, and a vast repository of software packages. It also offers a Pro version with additional features and support options. npm, being a fundamental tool for JavaScript development, has a large and vibrant community with extensive documentation, tutorials, and support channels.

  6. Platform Compatibility: Chocolatey is specifically designed for Windows and works well on various versions of the Windows operating system. It can be integrated with existing Windows management tools and processes. npm, on the other hand, is platform-agnostic and can be used on any operating system that supports Node.js.

In summary, Chocolatey is a Windows-focused package manager that excels in automating software installations, while npm is a JavaScript package manager primarily used for managing dependencies in Node.js projects.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on npm, Chocolatey

StackShare
StackShare

Apr 23, 2019

Needs adviceonNode.jsNode.jsnpmnpmYarnYarn

From a StackShare Community member: “I’m a freelance web developer (I mostly use Node.js) and for future projects I’m debating between npm or Yarn as my default package manager. I’m a minimalist so I hate installing software if I don’t need to- in this case that would be Yarn. For those who made the switch from npm to Yarn, what benefits have you noticed? For those who stuck with npm, are you happy you with it?"

294k views294k
Comments
Mark
Mark

CTO at Gemsotec bvba

Apr 25, 2019

ReviewonReactReactTypeScriptTypeScriptYarnYarn

I use npm because I also mainly use React and TypeScript. Since several typings (from DefinitelyTyped) depend on the React typings, Yarn tends to mess up which leads to duplicate libraries present (different versions of the same type definition), which hinders the Typescript compiler. Npm always resolves to a single version per transitive dependency. At least that's my experience with both.

251k views251k
Comments
Oleksandr
Oleksandr

Senior Software Engineer at joyn

Dec 7, 2019

Decided

As we have to build the application for many different TV platforms we want to split the application logic from the device/platform specific code. Previously we had different repositories and it was very hard to keep the development process when changes were done in multiple repositories, as we had to synchronize code reviews as well as merging and then updating the dependencies of projects. This issues would be even more critical when building the project from scratch what we did at Joyn. Therefor to keep all code in one place, at the same time keeping in separated in different modules we decided to give a try to monorepo. First we tried out lerna which was fine at the beginning, but later along the way we had issues with adding new dependencies which came out of the blue and were not easy to fix. Next round of evolution was yarn workspaces, we are still using it and are pretty happy with dev experience it provides. And one more advantage we got when switched to yarn workspaces that we also switched from npm to yarn what improved the state of the lock file a lot, because with npm package-lock file was updated every time you run npm install, frequent updates of package-lock file were causing very often merge conflicts. So right now we not just having faster dependencies installation time but also no conflicts coming from lock file.

310k views310k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

npm
npm
Chocolatey
Chocolatey

npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.

It is based on a developer-centric package manager called NuGet. Unlike manual installations, It adds, updates, and uninstalls programs in the background requiring very little user interaction.

-
works with all existing software installation technologies; works with runtime binaries and zip archives
Statistics
GitHub Stars
17.6K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
3.0K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
137.4K
Stacks
96
Followers
82.2K
Followers
124
Votes
1.6K
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 648
    Best package management system for javascript
  • 382
    Open-source
  • 327
    Great community
  • 148
    More packages than rubygems, pypi, or packagist
  • 112
    Nice people matter
Cons
  • 5
    Bad at package versioning and being deterministic
  • 5
    Problems with lockfiles
  • 3
    Node-gyp takes forever
  • 1
    Super slow
No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available
Ansible
Ansible
Windows
Windows

What are some alternatives to npm, Chocolatey?

Meteor

Meteor

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

Bower

Bower

Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.

Elm

Elm

Writing HTML apps is super easy with elm-lang/html. Not only does it render extremely fast, it also quietly guides you towards well-architected code.

RequireJS

RequireJS

RequireJS loads plain JavaScript files as well as more defined modules. It is optimized for in-browser use, including in a Web Worker, but it can be used in other JavaScript environments, like Rhino and Node. It implements the Asynchronous Module API. Using a modular script loader like RequireJS will improve the speed and quality of your code.

Browserify

Browserify

Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

Julia

Julia

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library.

Yarn

Yarn

Yarn caches every package it downloads so it never needs to again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are faster than ever.

Racket

Racket

It is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It is designed to be a platform for programming language design and implementation. It is also used for scripting, computer science education, and research.

Component

Component

Component's philosophy is the UNIX philosophy of the web - to create a platform for small, reusable components that consist of JS, CSS, HTML, images, fonts, etc. With its well-defined specs, using Component means not worrying about most frontend problems such as package management, publishing components to a registry, or creating a custom build process for every single app.

PureScript

PureScript

A small strongly typed programming language with expressive types that compiles to JavaScript, written in and inspired by Haskell.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana