Astral vs pip

Astral makes open-source tools for Python development, including Ruff, a linter, and uv, a package and project manager. Both are written in Rust. uv brings together project management, a universal lockfile, script execution, Python version management, tool installation, workspaces and a pip-compatible interface. Astral describes that interface as providing a 10–100x speedup over pip. uv supports macOS, Linux and Windows. Its documented integrations include Docker, Jupyter, marimo, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, pre-commit, PyTorch, FastAPI, Bazel, artifact registries, Renovate, Dependabot, AWS Lambda and Coiled. Astral says its tools are permissively licensed and free forever. It describes security controls for workflows and releases, including read-only default workflow permissions, full-length commit-SHA pinning, Trusted Publishing, Sigstore attestations and immutable GitHub releases. Documentation directs users to its Discord community for support. The separate pyx package registry offers optimized installs and other package-management features, but is no longer accepting new signups. Astral has announced an agreement to join OpenAI as part of the Codex team.

pip installs Python packages from PyPI and other package indexes, as well as from version control URLs, local project directories, and source archives. It supports source distributions and wheels, resolves dependencies, and can install an environment specified in a requirements file. Its install command can produce a JSON report of installed packages. pip runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and the current version supports CPython 3.10 through 3.15 and the latest PyPy3. Other operating systems and Python versions are not supported by its maintainers. It is commonly included in virtual environments and Python downloads from python.org; ensurepip and get-pip.py are also installation options. An experimental standalone zip application is available, but its documentation advises against production use. pip is free. It does not collect telemetry, though it sends non-identifying details such as Python version and operating system to the remote indexes it accesses. Remote tampering checks are not enabled by default; hash-checking mode and binary-only installs are listed as more secure options.