What Conan does

Conan is an open-source, decentralized package manager for C and C++ native binaries, originally created in 2016 by founders Luis Martínez de Bartolomé Izquierdo and Diego Rodríguez-Losada and now maintained by JFrog Inc. with a dedicated full-time development team of 51–100 people headquartered in Madrid, Spain. The product, written in Python, creates, uploads, downloads, and manages pre-compiled binaries with full ABI compatibility control across architectures, compilers, runtimes, and C++ standard libraries, and falls back to source builds when binaries are unavailable. It targets Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, Android, iOS, embedded, and bare-metal devices, with native integration to CMake, MSBuild, Meson, SCons, Makefiles, Autotools, and B2, plus container/Docker toolchain support.

The product surface comprises four components: the Conan CLI (MIT-licensed and free), ConanCenter as the community-curated public repository (1,942 recipes and 10,151 references at time of input), JFrog Artifactory Community Edition for C/C++ as a free private repository host, and Conan Audit as a CVE-scanning service for CI/CD pipelines. Conan 2.0, released in 2024, modernized the dependency graph and build-system toolchains; the Conan 1.x line was sunset for new updates in September 2024 with ConanCenter traffic migrated to center2.conan.io.

Conan operates a community-led, product-led growth model. The client is free, and revenue accrues to JFrog's commercial Artifactory editions rather than to Conan directly — standalone revenue figures are not publicly disclosed. Adoption signals include 3.7M monthly PyPI downloads (top 1% of all PyPI projects), 2,900+ members in the #conan Slack channel, 70+ expert members in the Conan Tribe, ~6,000 community pull requests in 2023, and named production deployments at TomTom, Mercedes-Benz, Microblink, Keysight Technologies, Real-Time Innovations (RTI), Melexis, Pix4D, POCO, OpenROV, Plex, and Arxan.

Name

Conan

Legal name

Conan (Open Source Project)

Website

https://conan.io

Company type

Private

Founded year

2016

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

51–100 employees

Short description

Conan is a free, open-source (MIT) C/C++ package manager maintained by JFrog that creates, shares, and reuses pre-compiled native binaries across platforms, compilers, and configurations for enterprise and community developer teams.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Headquarters

HQ city

Madrid

HQ country

Spain

HQ region

Europe

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales, Operations

Revenue model

1. Open Source (Conan Client): Conan is completely free and open source under MIT license. The client tool is available at no cost for all users including commercial projects.
2. JFrog Artifactory Integration: While Conan itself is free, JFrog offers Artifactory CE for C/C++ (free) and commercial Artifactory editions that provide enterprise repository hosting for Conan packages with advanced features, support, and security.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels7 records

Marketing channels8 records

Core offering

Conan is an open-source, decentralized package manager for C and C++ that creates, uploads, downloads and manages pre-compiled native binaries across all operating systems, compilers, architectures and configurations. It includes the Conan 2.0 client, the ConanCenter public recipe repository, the free Artifactory Community Edition for hosting private packages, and the Conan Audit service for security/CVE scanning of C/C++ dependency graphs.

Product overview

Conan is a decentralized, open-source C and C++ package manager (MIT licensed, version 2.0) that enables teams to create, share, and reuse native binaries across all platforms. The product suite consists of the core Conan package manager, the public ConanCenter repository (with 1,942 recipes and 10,151 references), the free Artifactory Community Edition for hosting private packages, and the Conan Audit service for CVE scanning. Conan integrates natively with major build systems including CMake, MSBuild, Meson, and Autotools, and provides binary management for multiple configurations (architectures, compilers, runtimes) with on-demand source builds when binaries are unavailable.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Conan 2.0 Package Manager Decentralized, open-source C and C++ package manager (MIT licensed) that creates, shares, and reuses native binaries across teams with support for all compilers, build systems, platforms and architectures. Designed for C/C++ development teams managing complex dependency graphs, reproducible builds, binary caching and cross-platform targets.
• ConanCenter The central public repository of community-maintained Conan recipes and package references for thousands of popular open-source C/C++ libraries. Functions as the discovery and distribution hub for open-source C/C++ packages.
• Artifactory CE for C/C++ Free Artifactory Community Edition server tailored for C/C++ development that enables teams to host private Conan packages on their own server with WebUI, advanced authentication, permissions, high performance and a generic CLI for any source or binary artifact.
• Conan Audit Security scanning service that detects known CVEs in C/C++ dependency graphs and integrates vulnerability scanning into CI/CD pipelines, providing actionable insights for remediation.

Quantifiable outcome

• 10x reduction in development compile-test cycle and release build times
• +4 more outcomes

Named customers11 records

Segments5 records

Ideal customer profiles4 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration11 records

Feature8 records

Partnerships

One partnership is on record.

• JFrog Inc.coreStrategic or Co-development PartnerJFrog Inc. maintains Conan with a dedicated full-time development team including the Conan founders and additional developers. JFrog sponsors the project and integrates Conan with JFrog Artifactory for enterprise package management. The partnership enables Conan to benefit from JFrog's resources and enterprise distribution channels while JFrog leverages Conan's C++ package management capabilities.

Scale indicators9 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights5 records

Direct peers

• vcpkg: Microsoft-developed C and C++ package manager. Direct competitor to Conan in the C/C++ dependency management and binary caching category, with strong default distribution via Visual Studio and CMake.
• Hunter: CMake-based C/C++ package manager focused on portability and reproducibility. Overlaps directly with Conan's CMake integration and cross-platform positioning.
• Spack: Package manager for HPC and scientific C/C++ stacks. Comparable in solving native-binary dependency management for large, multi-platform C/C++ codebases.
• build2: C++ build toolchain that includes a package manager (cppget.org). Competes with Conan as an alternative toolchain-and-dependency solution for C++ projects.

Broad incumbents

• JFrog Artifactory: JFrog's enterprise artifact repository. Operated by the same parent as Conan and integrates natively with it; provides repository hosting, security and distribution for Conan packages.
• NuGet: Microsoft's package manager for .NET with extensions into native C/C++ packages. Represents a broader package-management incumbent and competing default distribution channel.

Emerging players

• Conda: Cross-language package and environment manager widely used in data science and scientific Python/C++. Comparable as a community-driven package and binary management platform.
• Bazel: Google's polyglot build and dependency management system with strong native (C/C++) support. Solves overlapping problems around reproducible multi-platform builds.

Market position

Strengths4 records

Weaknesses4 records

Competitive moat6 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• GitHubgithub.com/conan-io/conan
• Xx.com/conan_io
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/conan-io

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles2 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Conan