MacPorts is a package manager for macOS used for installing mostly UNIX/BSD/Linux software. Many packages are pre-compiled for various versions of macOS so installation is fairly quick.

I do like Homebrew which I was using before and here are some differences:

• MacPorts supports older versions of macOS. Homebrew is the current major OS plus two major OSes back (which means my 2018 Mac mini is too old -- you can still use Homebrew but it wants to compile everything which can take hours). MacPorts has an installer back to macOS Leopard (10.5) and for each package you can see in the details which ports that package built successfully or not.
• MacPorts uses sudo a lot which Homebrew generally does not.
• Since MacPorts seems less popular they don't seem to get the latest versions as quickly as Homebrew. On the other hand they have older ports than Homebrew.

I used MacPorts to recreate my server environment on my Mac mini (running macOS 12) when my MBP Intel (running macOS 26) died. Only problem I had was with Postgresql -- MacPorts and Homebrew set up the default environment differently so I couldn't just copy the data directories. Theoretically you can export then import schema+data but that didn't work so I ended up using Homebrew to install Postgresql 15.

Overall though MacPorts seems quite fine for installing UNIX/BSD/Linux software on macOS.

(There is also Fink, which covers macOS 10.9 to 10.15 so not as good OS support as MacPorts.)