Instead of Poetry: uv

Why uv is better

• Astral reports uv as 10 to 100 times faster than pip, and its resolver and installer are written in Rust. Locking and syncing a large Poetry project is noticeably slower.
• uv downloads and pins the interpreter a project needs, which Poetry leaves to pyenv or the system.
• uv keeps dependencies in the standard [project] table of pyproject.toml, so other tools can read them without a Poetry-specific section.
• uv run handles one-off scripts with inline dependencies, and uvx runs command-line tools, replacing pipx alongside Poetry.

When to keep Poetry

Keep Poetry if your release pipeline depends on Poetry plugins, or if your team relies on its version-bumping and publishing commands and has no time to retest the process. A working Poetry setup is not broken, and Poetry still receives releases.

Switching

Run uvx migrate-to-uv in the project. It converts project metadata, dependencies, dependency groups, sources and entry points from Poetry, including Poetry 2.0+ projects, into standard pyproject.toml fields and a uv.lock. Then replace poetry install with uv sync and poetry run with uv run in scripts and CI.

Watch out

The lockfile formats are not interchangeable, so the whole team has to switch at once. uv is now owned by OpenAI, which bought Astral in March 2026 and says uv stays open source.

Also worth a look

• PDM A standards-based Python project manager with lockfiles; pick it if you want a Python-written tool with a plugin system.

More newer, better package managers and environment tools

• npm →, use pnpm
• pip →, use uv
• pyenv →, use uv
• Conda →, use Pixi