Astral vs virtualenv
Astral
astral.shvirtualenv
virtualenv.pypa.ioSide by side
| Figure | Astral | virtualenv |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Python Package Managers | 8.1 (#5) | 7.3 (#23) |
| Integrations | uv documentation lists integrations for Docker, Jupyter, marimo, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, pre-commit, PyTorch, FastAPI, Bazel, artifact registries, Renovate, Dependabot, AWS Lambda and Coiled. | The documentation names tox, poetry, and pipx as tools that use virtualenv’s programmatic API. |
| Release security | Astral says it uses Trusted Publishing, Sigstore attestations, immutable GitHub releases and checksum-embedded standalone installers where possible. | Releases publish provenance attestations and CycloneDX SBOMs, with SPDX SBOMs also available for the wheel; the documentation explains how to verify release files. |
Plans
In their own words
Astral
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.
virtualenv
virtualenv has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.