MacPorts vs uv
MacPorts
macports.orguv
docs.astral.shSide by side
| Figure | MacPorts | uv |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Package Managers | 7.7 (#61) | 8.9 (#4) |
| Dependency resolution | Yes | Yes |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | The project uses Trac for bug tracking and its wiki, with read-only integration to the Git repository through a source browser and project timeline. | The documentation lists integrations and guides for Docker, Jupyter, marimo, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Pre-commit, PyTorch, FastAPI, and several package registries. |
| Package formats | tbz2,tar,tbz,tgz,tlz,txz,xar,zip,cpgz,cpio | source distributions,wheels,requirements.txt,pylock.toml |
| Purpose | MacPorts is a community project providing a command-line system to compile, install, and upgrade open-source software on Mac. | uv is an extremely fast Python package and project manager written in Rust. |
| Security | The project provides checksums for packaged downloads and identifies a public key for verifying detached GPG signatures. | uv uses TLS with rustls and bundled Mozilla root certificates by default to verify HTTPS connections. |
| Supported platforms | macOS | macOS,Linux,Windows,CPython,PyPy,Pyodide,GraalPy |
Plans
In their own words
uv
uv is a Python package and project manager for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Written in Rust, it manages dependencies and environments, with lockfiles and workspaces, and can install, list, pin, or uninstall Python versions. It also runs scripts with dependencies and runs or installs command-line tools from Python packages. Its pip-compatible interface is intended to cover work done by tools such as pip, pip-tools, pipx, poetry, pyenv, twine, and virtualenv, though its commands do not exactly match those tools. The documentation describes uv as 10–100x faster than pip. It supports source distributions, wheels, requirements.txt, and pylock.toml, as well as offline installation and private registry authentication. For package selection, its default first-index strategy limits candidates to the first index where a package is found. Credentials are not stored in uv.lock, but uv currently stores them in a plaintext file; native system secret storage is an experimental preview. The free plan is free.