vcpkg

C++ never shipped with a package manager, so getting a library meant hunting down the source and fighting its build by hand. vcpkg is Microsoft's fix. List the libraries your project needs and it downloads the source, builds it with your compiler settings, and wires it into CMake or MSBuild. MIT licensed, free, and it runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

There is nothing to host, but there is a build bill. Most ports in the public registry compile from source, so the first install of each library is slow, and every CI runner repeats that work until you set up a binary cache. GitHub Packages and Azure DevOps Artifacts both work as cache hosts. Do that on day one.

Solo and small teams: free, and the natural pick on Windows and Visual Studio. Medium and large teams: still free, with someone owning the cache. Conan is the real alternative. It is decentralized, leans on prebuilt binaries, and writes recipes in Python, where vcpkg keeps one curated catalog versioned together.

The catch: telemetry is on by default. It reports the command line and timing under a random ID until you set VCPKG_DISABLE_METRICS or bootstrap with -disableMetrics. Microsoft's own docs also say macOS changes frequently break vcpkg's testing.