Anaconda Vs Miniconda Vs Vanilla Python - Which one to use ? Confused ?

Have you heard about Anaconda or Miniconda ?

If you are a python developer or someone who is interested to learn python, you should definitely know this.

Here I will be explaining these from an individual user's perspective.

Anaconda - This is one of the world's popular opensource python distribution with lot of machine learning and datascience packages. This is the best option for someone who is interested to learn datascience & machine learning. This is like a complete ecosystem of libraries and packages for a data scientist or an advanced python programmer.

Miniconda - This is a minimal version of anaconda.  It is a small, bootstrap version of Anaconda that includes only conda, Python, the packages they depend on, and a small number of other useful packages, including pip, zlib and a few others.

Both Anaconda and Miniconda comes with conda package manager. Using conda, we can install the required package from several thousands of cloud repositories. So it is very easy to find and install dependent packages using conda.

Official Python - This is the standard version of Python. This uses pip package manager.

I would recommend miniconda for using as the development environment in windows for basic level python developers as it will be easy to handle the dependencies. Some of the packages will cause trouble while installing using pip in windows.