In short. I typed winget upgrade once on this machine. Forty-two programs came back with updates pending. Wireshark, yt-dlp, tools whose names I had forgotten, one after another. Finding each homepage and downloading each installer would have taken half a day.
A free app I built myself. Give it a try.
Linux has apt and the Mac has brew. Windows has tools that do the same job, and there are three of them. This post covers what separates winget, Chocolatey and Scoop, and which one to pick. The conclusion first: start with winget and fill the gaps with the other two.
winget is already on your machine
winget is Microsoft's official tool. Windows 11 ships with it, and recent Windows 10 gets it bundled with App Installer from the Store. That means there is nothing to install. Open a terminal, type the following, and if you get a version you are ready.
winget --versionThree things are enough to use it. Find by name, install by id, upgrade everything at once.
winget search git
winget install Git.Git
winget upgrade --allThe results of winget search include an id column. It is safer to install by that id than by name. That stops a similarly named but unrelated package from being picked up.
Chocolatey and Scoop fill the places winget leaves empty
Chocolatey is the elder, around since 2011. Its community repository holds close to ten thousand packages. Each package carries its own install script, so it handles installation options in fine detail. The default install location is C:\ProgramData\chocolatey and it needs administrator rights. The open-source edition is Apache 2.0 licensed, so it is free to use at work. A separate paid business edition adds more features.
Scoop has the opposite character. It unpacks programs inside your user folder only (C:\Users\<user>\scoop). It needs no administrator rights and does not touch the registry. For anyone who cannot get administrator rights on a work machine, that is decisive.
Packages are grouped into "buckets". When something is not in the default bucket you add another, as in scoop bucket add extras. The bucket sizes I measured on my machine were 1,637 in main, 2,372 in extras and 336 in java.
One table separates the three
| Item | winget | Chocolatey | Scoop |
|---|---|---|---|
| Separate install | Not needed | Needed | Needed |
| Administrator rights | Usually needed | Needed | Not needed |
| Install location | Same as a normal install | C:\ProgramData\chocolatey | User folder |
| What it does well | General programs | Install-option control, company rollouts | Developer tools, machines without rights |
Scoop installs in two lines from an ordinary, non-administrator PowerShell window. The first line permits script execution.
Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri https://get.scoop.sh | Invoke-ExpressionThe payoff comes when you set up a new machine
For installing one program, a command and a mouse are about the same. The gap opens when you get a new computer. winget exports the list of what is installed now to a file. That file restores all of it on the new machine.
winget export -o apps.json
winget import -i apps.json --accept-package-agreements --accept-source-agreementsThe exported apps.json is just a text file. Open it in Notepad and delete lines you do not want. The two options on the end skip the agreement prompts during installation. Without them the run stops at each program waiting for confirmation.
Summary
Windows installs and updates programs from the command line too. winget is already there, so there is nothing to prepare. Add Scoop when you have no administrator rights. Add Chocolatey when you need fine control over installation options. The three do not conflict, so keep them on one machine together.
Open a terminal now and type winget upgrade. It takes a few seconds to find out how many updates have been piling up.