uv vs pip vs Poetry: 50+ Package Install Speed Test

#uv #poetry #python #pip

Installing 50 Packages Takes 2.5 Minutes with pip. uv Does It in 12 Seconds.

I cloned a Django project with 57 dependencies yesterday and ran pip install -r requirements.txt. Watched the terminal scroll. Made coffee. Came back. Still installing.

Then I tried uv pip install -r requirements.txt on the same lockfile. Twelve seconds.

This isn't a synthetic benchmark. This is a real mid-sized web app with Django, Celery, psycopg2, Pillow, and the usual suspects. The kind of project where pip install is the bottleneck in CI, local setup, and Docker builds.

But uv's speed comes with tradeoffs. Poetry gives you deterministic builds and dependency resolution that actually works. pip is everywhere and requires zero setup. So which one should you actually use?

I ran the same 57-package install across all three tools, measured cold cache, warm cache, and CI scenarios, and tracked exactly where each tool spends its time.