Comparing Python package managers

Comparison Link to heading

Tool	Lock file	Manage Python versions	Global cache	PEP compliant	Packaging/PyPI distribution
Hatch	❌	✅		✅	✔️ only using Hatch build backend
pip	❌	❌		✅
Pipenv	✅	❌			❌
PDM	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Poetry	✅	❌		❌	✔️ only using Poetry build backend
uv	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅

uv can install and manage Python version (like pyenv); Poetry can’t
uv manages dependencies and environments for single-file scripts
- uv add --script <my-script> <package> && uv run <my-script>
- That’s cool, I never seen that in other Python tools
Disk-space efficient; global cache for dependency deduplication
- I don’t know how other tools manage that. It would be interesting to compare with Poetry
Drop-in replacement for pip
- alias pip='uv pip'

uv python install <version> to install a Python version
uv run --python <version> -- <command> to run a command with a specific Python version

“does not follow the standard specifying how metadata should be represented in a pyproject.toml file (PEP 621), instead using a custom [tool.poetry] table. This is partly because Poetry came out before PEP 621.”