Mamba installs these packages in only a third of the time that Conda does. Much of that is due to less CPU usage, but even network downloads seem to be little faster; Mamba uses parallel downloads to speed them up.

So which should you use, pip or Conda? For general Python computing, pip and PyPI are usually fine, and the surrounding tooling tends to be better. For data science or scientific computing, however, Conda’s ability to package third-party libraries, and the centralized infrastructure provided by Conda-Forge, means setup of complex packages will often be easier.