Chocolatey Guide — Windows Package Manager for Power Users

Chocolatey is the original Windows package manager with a massive community-maintained catalog. It predates winget and has more packages.

Installation

Open PowerShell as Administrator:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force
[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072
iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

Installing Apps

choco install firefox
choco install vlc
choco install vscode
choco install discord

Useful Commands

Command	Action
choco search <term>	Find packages
choco install <pkg>	Install
choco upgrade all	Update everything
choco list --local-only	Show installed
choco uninstall <pkg>	Remove

Chocolatey vs winget

	Chocolatey	winget
Age	Since 2011	Since 2020
Catalog	~10,000 packages	~5,000 packages
Built-in	No	Yes (Win 10/11)
GUI	Community tools available	No

Use winget if you want the built-in Microsoft solution. Use Chocolatey if you need a larger catalog or more mature tooling.