Are there any disadvantages to using Bitnami vs a native server stack?

I'm a happy bitnami stack user. It's a great stack. I can describe many advantages.

The draw back of using bitnami stack is the update cycle. For example on Debian/Ubuntu based system, you can not use the standard apt-get update/upgrade.

That means some security updates might not get to your system as fast as your standard cron (automated periodic) update mechanism.

To upgrade the system you will need to create backup, install a new stack, then import the backup to the new stack. Which might not be an ideal procedure.

Some people categorize that as non-production-environment.

There are 3 common drawbacks to Bitnami vs. a native LEMP/LAMP stack:

1. File paths. Because Bitnami is a container approach to web stacks, it installs everything in Ubuntu (or whatever Linux distro) under the /opt/bitnami directory. So, many developers who are used to customizing their stack using nano or vim editors (via the Bash shell) quickly discover that you first have to figure out where all the different configuration files of your stack modules reside, etc. Even after you figure those out, most of the online tutorials and documentations you might find will not apply to your stack.

2. Lockdown. This could be seen as either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on your perspective (and situation). The entire point of using a containerized approach is to have more control of the stack environment, which can improve compatibility, predictability, security, and otherwise. However as @team-life mentioned, this can quickly become frustrating when you are trying to use "standard" Bash shell commands or even the MySQL CLI, e.g. when trying to analyze or replicate your stack, etc. To put it simply, logging into shell on a server where Bitnami is installed is not in fact logging into the actual shell :)

3. Upgrades. At the end of the day, Bitnami (and other containers, like Docker) are adding another "layer" to your stack, and thus, more bloat. For some users this "bloat" is justifiable, and preferable (for example, very large companies who require across-the-board uniformity). But what many developers discover with Bitnami and containers is upgrading your stack can be rather janky. For all the alleged advantages in terms of environment "stability", it turns out that upgrading your stack can actually introduce quite a bit of instability and unpredictability, often to the extent of canceling out the benefits. As @domi mentioned, all upgrades run through Bitnami (and not Ubuntu mirrors, etc) meaning you are bound to their versions and release schedules; you are also often required to completely re-install the stack again...

Ultimately, containers are a recent trend that have become very popular among so-called "enterprise" and "corporate" in-house teams, but it is one of those things that might not be the best features for smaller agencies or independent developers to embrace.

That is why native LEMP stacks like SlickStack (my project) are gaining momentum.

This Reddit thread has a few other AWS-specific comments as well.

BitNami uses paths that will be very different from the industry standard ones so if you are trying to login to a server to do some task, it will take you a lot of time to understand their custom-made-folder-structure. And that's a big drawback. When you login to a unix server, you know where the files and paths are, maybe you have one or two options, that are standard. BitNami uses a completely different one. Chaos ensues.

I am one of the developers of BitNami. Whether to use a native stack or a BitNami stack depends on what you are trying to do. Installing the individual items separately should be exactly the same as running our installer, and the whole purpose why we put the installers together is so you would not have to :) In the case of Mac, one of the advantages of BitNami is that you can have more up-to-date components and multiple installations. A disadvantage / difference is that the applications and path will be different than the typical ones so if you are using third-party tutorials or documentation, it may not work right away