Anaconda: Yay or Nay? Any particular reason to use it over the out-of-the-box regular Python?
Confusion between Python and Anaconda - Stack Overflow
Can someone explain why people use Anaconda for Python?
How is Anaconda related to Python? - Stack Overflow
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/ 23 June 2025; 9 months ago (2025-06-23)
/ 23 June 2025; 9 months ago (2025-06-23)
Howdy!
I've started messing with python for data analysis and general automation some time ago. You know, csv, Excel, pandas and the like. So using Anaconda was kind of implied, since it apparently was 'easier' to use because it is oriented for Data Analysis. I'm not a software dev or data scientist, but I use python for ETL scripts and other simple automation tasks.
Recently, I've been thinking if it is actually better to use Anaconda or not. I've had a couple of issues with it at my job and with some personal projects that made me think that Anaconda is just a second-hand Python installation and package/venv manager on top of a regular Python installation, which should not be necessary.
It might be easier and simpler to just use the regular python for everything.
I mean, are there modules available with Anaconda that aren't available with a regular pip? If I don't use Anaconda, am I blocking myself out of some important functionality that will actually give me some benefit? Am I right to assume that Anaconda adds an extra layer of configuration that can cause issues when dealing with configurations in general (venvs, installed libraries, interpreters, etc)?
Should I just uninstall everything related to Anaconda and do a fresh python install? What is the general opinion about Anaconda?
Cheers!
Anaconda is a commercial Python distribution and collection of hundreds of packages related to data science, scientific programming, development and more. Python is included in the Anaconda distribution. It is not an IDE (like PyCharm that mentioned in the comments) though it can be configured with most IDEs. I will note that the distribution includes an IDE called Spyder. It also comes with a platform-agnostic package manager called conda.
You can read more here: https://docs.continuum.io/anaconda/
Anaconda is a popular Python data science platform.

Anaconda is a commercial distribution of:
- Python and R programming languages for large-scale data processing, predictive analytics, and scientific computing, that aims to simplify package management and deployment.
Also, you can very well install Anaconda for any operating system i.e linux or windows. They have navigator which will be of great use to launch modules available.
Anaconda while installing asks Python version :

Find more about anaconda at :
Official Website
Anaconda Docs
I have been using Python for a while now (without Anaconda) for my web development class at school. I noticed that a lot of people use Anaconda for Python, so I decided to see what it was. After trying it out myself it seems like a Python environment with pre-installed libraries. Why don't people just install Python and add libraries when they need them? I'm sorry if this is a silly question, but, what is the purpose of Anaconda?
Edit: Thank you for all the answers! I think I have a better idea of why people use Anaconda. I think for my purposes I can stick to using venv and install packages when I need them.
Anaconda is a commercial python and R distribution. It aims to provide everything you need (Python-wise) for data science "out of the box".
It includes:
- The core Python language
- 100+ Python "packages" (libraries)
- Spyder (IDE/editor - like PyCharm) and Jupyter
conda, Anaconda's own package manager, used for updating Anaconda and packages
Your course may have recommended it as it comes with these extras but if you don't need them and are getting on fine with vanilla Python that's OK too.
Learn more: https://www.anaconda.com/distribution/
Anaconda is a Python distribution that makes it easy to install Python plus a number of its most often used 3rd party libraries in a flexible way on a Windows or Linux machine.
My experiences with it are very positive, both on Windows and Linux. It is quite complete and avoids problems in building libraries that you need from source code, that frequently plague one by one installations of those libraries by tools like pip.
By the way: It's very wise to start with 3.5 or 3.6 since 2.7 is approaching the end of its lifecycle, though many applications still depend on it.
As for tutorials: Pythons own docs are quite suitable for learning the language.
https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/
Hi, I'm pretty new to python and I was wondering why do you use Anaconda and should I use it, and also what are some downsides of it