Pipenv only targets applications; Poetry targets both applications and libraries. Pipenv has quite some drama behind it that I do not want to get into; in contrast, Poetry's development has been quite professional. Pipenv enjoys better tool support, e.g. it is recognized and supported by VS Code; but Poetry does not have the same level of support.

I don't know anything about pipenv drama, so by morbid curiosity I looked for it and this is the first thing I found:

https://github.com/pypa/pipenv/issues/2228

This is one of the most ridiculous issues I've read. If the rest of the "drama" is like that, then eh.

The drama was surrounding false advertising so to speak. Pipenv promised a lot but did not quite deliver, much like the earlier days of MongoDB. But more importantly, it pretended or at least heavily implied it was an official PSF-affiliated project, when it was not. How that claim was substantiated was also subject to drama.

It also had no releases for over a year, even though the master branch was getting frequent updates and the performance of the last release was atrocious (and I'm not sure if it has improved much).

I did like the emojis in the logs though.

FWIW here's VSCode's issue for supporting Poetry[1] and here's their plan to support it[2]:

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/issues/8372

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/wiki/Support-poet...

From memory, there was a whole thing where pipenv, created by Kenneth Reitz of requests fame, was misaccurately portrayed as the official successor to pip when that wasn't true

I recall this, but I wasn’t quite clear on what the issue was with pipenv itself (other than questionable behaviour from the author)

It was buggy. It was slow. It didn't even try to support developing libraries.

Now it’s all coming back to me. I remember it half supporting in-house pip repositories but not quite

I just moved a project from pipenv to poetry at work. My biggest issue with pipenv is that you can't selectively upgrade dependencies. Trying to `pipenv update xyz` basically blows away your lockfile and updates everything. There's a command line flag to be more selective but it doesn't work. I found an open GitHub issue about it that's years old.

Poetry by contrast works pretty much like any modern dependency system you'd be familiar with from another language like cargo, npm, or hex.

In addition to everything else already said, pipenv is mind-bogglingly slow and buggy. Like 30 minutes and a timeout error to install pyspark.

Poetry is better.

Well that settles it

I think pipenv is better for managing non-published Python environments, so there.

pipenv has slightly better support in vscode

> Support for poetry environments is currently our highest upvoted feature request on GitHub.

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/wiki/Support-poet...