Which is better - PyInstaller or cx_Freeze?

python pyinstaller cx-freeze
Mridang Agarwalla picture Mridang Agarwalla · Jul 22, 2010 · Viewed 16.2k times · Source

Could someone tell me which is better of the two for bundling Python applications — cx_Freeze or PyInstaller? I'm looking for a comparison based on factors such as:

  1. Popularity (i.e. larger user base)
  2. Footprint of the built binary
  3. Cross platform compatibility
  4. Ease of use

Answer

Velociraptors picture Velociraptors · Jul 30, 2010

I tried both for a current project and decided to use cx_freeze. I found it easier to get started. It has an option to bundle dependencies in a zip archive, which makes it easy to check that everything was properly included.

I had trouble getting PyInstaller to include certain egg dependencies. It couldn't handle conditional imports as well as I needed and looking through the bundled archive was difficult. On Windows, it requires pywin32 (so it can't be used with virtualenv) and version 1.4 doesn't work with Python 2.6. There's no information on whether Python 2.7 is supported.

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