NumPy VS SymPy

Compare NumPy vs SymPy and see what are their differences.

NumPy

The fundamental package for scientific computing with Python. (by numpy)
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NumPy SymPy
310 38
31,038 14,191
1.0% 1.0%
10.0 9.9
4 days ago 4 days ago
Python Python
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

NumPy

Posts with mentions or reviews of NumPy. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-11-25.

SymPy

Posts with mentions or reviews of SymPy. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-10-06.
  • Translating Cython to Mojo, a first attempt
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Oct 2025
    It looks like Narwhals; "Narwhals and scikit-Lego came together to achieve dataframe-agnosticism" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40950813 :

    > Narwhals: https://narwhals-dev.github.io/narwhals/ :

    >> Extremely lightweight compatibility layer between [pandas, Polars, cuDF, Modin]

    > Lancedb/lance works with [Pandas, DuckDB, Polars, Pyarrow,]; https://github.com/lancedb/lance

    SymPy has Solvers for ODEs and PDEs and convex optimization. SymPy also has lambdify to compile from a relatively slow symbolic expression tree to faster 'vectorized' functions

    From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40683777 re: warp :

    > sympy.utilities.lambdify.lambdify() https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/main/sympy/utilities/lam... :

    >>> """Convert a SymPy expression into a function that allows for fast numeric evaluation""" [with e.g. the CPython math module, mpmath, NumPy, SciPy, CuPy, JAX, TensorFlow, PyTorch (*), SymPy, numexpr, but not yet cmath]

  • Automatic Differentiation Can Be Incorrect
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Sep 2025
    I have been using sympy while learning electron physics to automatically integrate linear charge densities. It works great symbolically, but often fails silently when the symbols are substituted with floats before integration.

    https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues/27675

  • Mathics 7.0 – Open-source alternative to Mathematica
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Dec 2024
    It's an interesting exercise to think about why the performance of Sum[i, {i, 1, 100000}] differs between Mathics and MMA: Mathics just calls down to sympy, which I think just does the sum in Python [1]; Mathematica (likely) pattern-matches and computes the 100000th triangular number directly, since I know Mathematica relies heavily on standard tables of summations/integrals/etc.

    [1] https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/master/sympy/concrete/su....

  • Nvidia Warp: A Python framework for high performance GPU simulation and graphics
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Jun 2024
    From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37686351 :

    >> sympy.utilities.lambdify.lambdify() https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/a76b02fcd3a8b7f79b3a88df... :

    >> """Convert a SymPy expression into a function that allows for fast numeric evaluation [e.g. the CPython math module, mpmath, NumPy, SciPy, CuPy, JAX, TensorFlow, SymPy, numexpr,]

  • AutoCodeRover resolves 22% of real-world GitHub in SWE-bench lite
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Apr 2024
    Thank you for your interest. There are some interesting examples in the SWE-bench-lite benchmark which are resolved by AutoCodeRover:

    - From sympy: https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues/13643. AutoCodeRover's patch for it: https://github.com/nus-apr/auto-code-rover/blob/main/results...

    - Another one from scikit-learn: https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/issues/13070. AutoCodeRover's patch (https://github.com/nus-apr/auto-code-rover/blob/main/results...) modified a few lines below (compared to the developer patch) and wrote a different comment.

    There are more examples in the results directory (https://github.com/nus-apr/auto-code-rover/tree/main/results).

  • SymPy: Symbolic Mathematics in Python
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Feb 2024
    That's interesting. You should consider yourself lucky to have met Wolfram employees, as they are obviously vastly outnumbered by users of Mathematica.

    I have not met any developers for either of these products but I know that SymPy has a huge list of contributors for a project of its size. See: https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/master/AUTHORS

    You may not be hearing about SymPy users because SymPy is not a monolithic product. It is a library. If you know mathematicians big into using Python, they are probably aware of SymPy as it is the main attraction when it comes to symbolic computation in Python.

  • Matrix Cookbook examples using SymPy
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2024
  • Fast Symbolic Computation for Robotics
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Nov 2023
    https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues/9479 suggests that multivariate inequalities are still unsolved in SymPy, though it looks like https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/21687 was merged in August. This probably isn't yet implemented in C++ in SymForce yet?
  • Solving a simple puzzle using SymPy
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Aug 2023
    bug report opened https://github.com/sympy/sympy/issues/25507
  • Stem Formulas
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jul 2023
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36463580

    From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159017 :

    > sympy.utilities.lambdify.lambdify() https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/a76b02fcd3a8b7f79b3a88df... :

    >> """Convert a SymPy expression into a function that allows for fast numeric evaluation [with the CPython math module, mpmath, NumPy, SciPy, CuPy, JAX, TensorFlow, SymPy, numexpr,]*

    From https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-19084622 :

    > "latex2sympy parses LaTeX math expressions and converts it into the equivalent SymPy form" and is now merged into SymPy master and callable with sympy.parsing.latex.parse_latex(). It requires antlr-python-runtime to be installed. https://github.com/augustt198/latex2sympy https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/13706

    ENH: 'generate a Jupyter notebook' (nbformat .ipynb JSON) function from this stem formula

What are some alternatives?

When comparing NumPy and SymPy you can also consider the following projects:

mitmproxy - An interactive TLS-capable intercepting HTTP proxy for penetration testers and software developers.

SciPy - SciPy library main repository

Pandas - Flexible and powerful data analysis / manipulation library for Python, providing labeled data structures similar to R data.frame objects, statistical functions, and much more

Numba - NumPy aware dynamic Python compiler using LLVM

Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video.
Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
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InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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the 2nd most popular programming language
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