Hi @Mondi 

The important differences between parcels and packages are:

• Parcels are self-contained and installed in a versioned directory, which means that multiple versions of a given parcel can be installed side-by-side. You can then designate one of these installed versions as the active one. With packages, only one package can be installed at a time so there is no distinction between what is installed and what is active.
• You can install parcels at any location in the filesystem. They are installed by default in /opt/cloudera/parcels. In contrast, packages are installed in /usr/lib.
• When you install from the Parcels page, Cloudera Manager automatically downloads, distributes and activates the correct parcel for the operating system running on each host in the cluster. 

Note: You cannot install software using both parcels and packages in the same cluster.

Because of their unique properties, parcels offer more advantages over packages, for more details please refer here

Hope this helps. Please accept the answer and vote up if it did.

Regards,