Anaconda does not leverage virtualenv under the hood. Anaconda does not use wheels as part of that. However, you can use pip and virtualenvs within Anaconda, bu

Anaconda does not leverage virtualenv under the hood. Anaconda does not use wheels as part of that. However, you can use pip and virtualenvs within Anaconda, but you'll probably get some inconsistent results. The reason that Anaconda exists is to make it easier for people to have consistency between their dev environment, the build environment, and the prod environment. If you're seriously going to build all of the scientific Python stack from scratch, correctly and optimally, for your prod environment (and then also do the same for every dev environment you need to support), then you have way too much time and probably haven't actually tried doing it over any real period of time. The problem isn't that it's impossible. The problem is that there are dozens of different ways to almost succeed, and you don't run into the problems until way too late.