On macOS, python3 is the default python command. It's named this way to disambiguate it from python 2 (which would be python).
Homebrew's version of python is generally a bit more up to date than the bundled macOS one (macOS 12.6 comes with 3.9.6 at the time of writing), so I prefer to use Homebrew's package.
Homebrew has versioned packages available, such as python@3.11 and a generic python3 package (which is a recent stable version, but not necessarily the latest).
The versioned packages install an executable with the version in the name, e.g. python3.10, python3.11, but do not alter the python3 executable.
As this could lead to potential confusion between the homebrew and macOS installations of python, I prefer to use brew install python3, as that will install a python3 executable to $(brew --prefix)/bin/python3. Since $(brew --prefix)/bin/ comes before /usr/bin on the $PATH, it will have precedence over the macOS python installation and avoid confusion.
- poetry
- pyenv