uv

Uv replaces all of them. It's a single tool that handles Python version management, virtual environments, package installation, and project management. And it does it 10-100x faster than pip because it's written in Rust.

Everything is free. No paid tier, no cloud, no account. Install it and it replaces pip, pip-tools, pyenv, virtualenv, and pipx in one binary. The speed difference isn't marginal. It's 'blink and it's done' versus 'go get coffee.'

The catch: uv is now an OpenAI project. OpenAI announced it was acquiring Astral (the team behind uv and Ruff) in March 2026 and pledged to keep the open source tools free. Astral's paid play was always pyx, a private package registry, not the CLI, so uv itself stays free. Some edge cases with legacy packages that rely on setup.py quirks can still trip it up. But the Python community has clearly voted.