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NuGet

NuGet is the official package manager for the .NET ecosystem, built by Microsoft and the .NET Foundation and distributed free and open-source. It ranks #13 among dev tools in usage surveys at roughly 18.9% share. It's built directly into Visual Studio, JetBrains Rider, and the dotnet CLI, making it the standard way C#/.NET (and F#/VB.NET) projects declare, restore, and update their library dependencies.

Quick facts
Type: .NET package manager
Made by: Microsoft / .NET Foundation
License: Free / open-source (Apache 2.0 client tools)
Platforms/Hosting: Windows, macOS, Linux (via the .NET SDK/CLI); packages hosted on nuget.org or private feeds
Primary use case: Adding, versioning, and restoring library dependencies in C#/.NET projects

Jump to: Example Getting started Best for

Example

Add a package from the CLI, which both installs it and records a PackageReference in the project's .csproj file.

# add a package to the current project
dotnet add package Newtonsoft.Json

# restore all packages listed in the project file
dotnet restore

<!-- MyApp.csproj -->
<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="Newtonsoft.Json" Version="13.0.3" />
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

Getting started

NuGet ships bundled with the .NET SDK — no separate install is needed once the SDK is on the machine.

# install the .NET SDK (includes NuGet), e.g. on Windows via winget
winget install Microsoft.DotNet.SDK.8

# verify NuGet/dotnet is available
dotnet --version

Best for: Any C#/.NET application — from ASP.NET Core web APIs to WPF desktop apps and Unity libraries — that needs a reliable, IDE-integrated way to manage third-party and internal library dependencies.