Dependency management in iOS and OS X projects used to be either completely manual or completely automatic as part of using CocoaPods. With Carthage , a new middle ground has become available. Carthage manages dependencies - it downloads, builds and updates frameworks - but it leaves the integration of the frameworks into the build of the project to the project. This is in contrast to CocoaPods, which basically takes over the project structure and build setup. It should be noted that Carthage can only deal with dynamic frameworks, which are not available on iOS 7 and below.