title: Anaconda vs. EPD Enthought vs. manual installation of Python
body: <p>What are the relative merits / downsides of various Python bundles (EPD / Anaconda) vs. a manual install?</p>
  
  <p>I have installed EPD academic, and I have no issues with it. It provides more packages that I think I will ever need, and it is very easy to update using enpkg enstaller. The EPD academic licence requires yearly renewal however and the free version does not do updates as easily.</p>
  
  <p>At the moment I really only use a handful of packages such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandas_%28software%29">Pandas</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NumPy">NumPy</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciPy">SciPy</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matplotlib">matplotlib</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPython">IPython</a>, <a href="http://statsmodels.sourceforge.net/">Statsmodels</a> and their respective dependencies. </p>
  
  <p>For such limited use am I better off with manual install and <code>pip install --upgrade 'package'</code> or do the bundles offer anything over and above this?</p>