Installation is faster. You can understand how the formulas work. You can make your own. You can find lots of them very easily. You can contribute more easily. It's on GitHub.<p>I dunno - there's probably more, but that's a quick list.<p>What really drove me to move was that I was having trouble with Snow Leopard not being supported very quickly by MacPorts. Even once everything I needed was working, I still had problems with CouchDB and couchdb-lucene. I'm not sure what the problem was, but I tried a few things that were suggested, and nothing worked.<p>So, I did the whole Scorched Earth thing and started fresh with Homebrew. Everything worked right away, and quickly. I found formulas were added very quickly. I found some that weren't in the main repo (I think couchdb-lucene was one of them) and they were all understandable and worked well.<p>All in all, I just had a much nicer experience with Homebrew than with MacPorts. I'm not hating on MacPorts, I'm just saying Homebrew hasn't caused me one moment of grief since I started using it. Well... maybe one, because I had to find and install the OS X package for Git to get started with installing everything else ;)