uv vs virtualenv
uv
docs.astral.shvirtualenv
virtualenv.pypa.ioSide by side
| Figure | uv | 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 | 8.0 (#10) | 7.3 (#23) |
| Integrations | The documentation lists integrations and guides for Docker, Jupyter, marimo, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Pre-commit, PyTorch, FastAPI, and several package registries. | The documentation names tox, poetry, and pipx as tools that use virtualenv’s programmatic API. |
| Maker | Astral says its mission is to make the Python ecosystem more productive by building high-performance developer tools, starting with Ruff. | The Python Packaging Authority is a working group that maintains core software projects used in Python packaging. |
| Purpose | uv is an extremely fast Python package and project manager written in Rust. | virtualenv is a command-line tool for creating isolated Python environments. |
| Speed | The documentation describes uv as 10–100x faster than pip. | It caches pre-built install images, so subsequent environment creation takes less than one second, according to its comparison with venv. |
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.
virtualenv
virtualenv has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.