Best Package Managers for Debian
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Compare the Top Package Managers that integrate with Debian as of September 2025
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This a list of Package Managers that integrate with Debian. Use the filters on the left to add additional filters for products that have integrations with Debian. View the products that work with Debian in the table below.
What are Package Managers for Debian?
Package managers are software tools that automate the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing software packages. They simplify dependency management by ensuring that required libraries and modules are downloaded and updated correctly. Many package managers connect to online repositories, allowing developers and system administrators to access large ecosystems of software quickly. By standardizing installations and updates, they reduce errors, improve consistency, and save time in both development and production environments. Package managers are widely used across programming languages, operating systems, and frameworks to streamline software distribution and maintenance. Compare and read user reviews of the best Package Managers for Debian currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
APT
Distro Tracker Developers
This software lets you follow the evolution of a Debian-based distribution both with email updates and with a comprehensive web interface. Having all the information about packages conveniently available in a single place is particularly interesting for package maintainers, contributors, advanced users, etc.Starting Price: Free -
2
Snapcraft
Snapcraft
This is the code repository for snapd, the background service that manages and maintains installed snaps. Snaps are app packages for desktop, cloud, and IoT that update automatically. Easy to install, secure, cross-platform, and dependency-free. They're being used on millions of Linux systems every day. Alongside its various service and management functions, snapd provides the snap command that's used to install and remove snaps and interact with the wider snap ecosystem, implements the confinement policies that isolate snaps from the base system and from each other, governs the interfaces that allow snaps to access specific system resources outside of their confinement. If you're looking for something to install, such as Spotify or Visual Studio Code, take a look at the Snap Store. And if you want to build your own snaps, start with our creating a snap documentation.Starting Price: Free -
3
Aptitude
Debian
Aptitude is an Ncurses and command-line based front-end to numerous Apt libraries, which are also used by Apt, the default Debian package manager. Aptitude is text-based and run from a terminal. A mutt-like syntax for matching packages in a flexible manner. Mark packages as "automatically installed" or "manually installed" so that packages can be auto-removed when no longer required (feature available in Apt, too, since quite a few Debian releases). Preview of actions about to be taken with different colors marking different actions. The ability to interactively retrieve and display the Debian changelog of all available official packages. Score-based dependency resolver which is more suitable for interactive dependency resolution with additional hints from the user like "I don't want that part of the solution but keep that other part of the solution for your next try". Apt's dependency resolver on the other hand is optimized for good "one-shot" solutions.Starting Price: Free -
4
Synaptic
Synaptic
Synaptic is a graphical package management program for apt. It provides the same features as the apt-get command-line utility with a GUI front-end based on Gtk+. Install, remove, upgrade and downgrade single and multiple packages. Upgrade your whole system. Manage package repositories (sources.list). Find packages by name, description, and several other attributes. Select packages by status, section, name, or a custom filter. Sort packages by name, status, size, or version. Browse all available online documentation related to a package. Download the latest changelog of a package. Lock packages to the current version. Force the installation of a specific package version. Undo/Redo selections. Built-in terminal emulator for the package manager. Debian/Ubuntu only, configure packages through the debconf system. Debian/Ubuntu only, Xapain-based fast search (thanks to Enrico Zini).Starting Price: Free -
5
Fink
Fink
The Fink project wants to bring the full world of Unix open source software to Darwin and Mac OS X. We modify Unix software so that it compiles and runs on Mac OS X ("port" it) and make it available for download as a coherent distribution. Fink uses Debian tools like dpkg and apt-get to provide powerful binary package management. You can choose whether you want to download precompiled binary packages or build everything from source. The project offers precompiled binary packages as well as a fully automated build-from-source system. Mac OS X includes only a basic set of command-line tools. Fink brings you enhancements for these tools as well as a selection of graphical applications developed for Linux and other Unix variants. With Fink the compile process is fully automated; you'll never have to worry about Makefiles or configure scripts and their parameters again. The dependency system automatically takes care that all required libraries are present.Starting Price: Free -
6
Zero Install
Zero Install
A decentralized cross-platform software installation system. Works on Linux, Windows and macOS. Fully open-source. Run apps with a single click. Run applications without having to install them first. Control everything from a command line or graphical interface. You control your own computer. You don't have to guess what happens during installation. Mix and match stable and experimental apps on a single system. Anyone can distribute software. Create one package that works on multiple platforms. Publish on any static web host; no central point of control. With dependency handling and automatic updates. Security is central. Installing an app doesn't grant it administrator access. Digital signatures are always checked before new software is run. Apps can share libraries without having to trust each other. Adds automatic self-updating, staged rollouts and various improvements to desktop integration.Starting Price: Free -
7
fpm
fpm
fpm is a tool that lets you easily create packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Arch Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and more! fpm isn’t a new packaging system, it’s a tool to help you make packages for existing systems with less effort. It does this by offering a command-line interface to allow you to create packages easily. FPM is written in ruby and can be installed using gem. For some package formats (like rpm and snap), you will need certain packages installed to build them. Some package formats require other tools to be installed on your machine to be built; especially if you are building a package for another operating system/distribution. FPM takes your program and builds packages that can be installed easily on various operating systems. It can take any nodejs package, ruby gem, or even a python package and turn it into a deb, rpm, pacman, etc. package.Starting Price: Free -
8
DPKG
Ubuntu
DPKG is a tool to install, build, remove and manage Debian packages. The primary and more user-friendly front-end for DPKG is aptitude. DPKG itself is controlled entirely via command line parameters, which consist of exactly one action and zero or more options. The action parameter tells DPKG what to do and options control the behavior of the action in some way. DPKG can also be used as a front-end to DPKG-deb(1) and DPKG-query. The list of supported actions can be found later on in the actions section. If any such action is encountered DPKG just runs DPKG-deb or DPKG-query with the parameters given to it, but no specific options are currently passed to them, to use any such option the back-ends need to be called directly. DPKG maintains some usable information about available packages. The information is divided into three classes, states, selection states, and flags. These values are intended to be changed mainly with dselect.Starting Price: Free
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