diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 813c2c307..abb954030 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -21,6 +21,7 @@
 - Update CI to use nf-core/setup-nextflow v2
 - Changelog bot: handle also patch version before dev suffix ([#2820](https://github.com/nf-core/tools/pull/2820))
 - Fix path in component update script ([#2823](https://github.com/nf-core/tools/pull/2823))
+- Using packaging.version instead of pkg_resources ([#2825](https://github.com/nf-core/tools/pull/2825))
 - Update prettier to 3.2.5 ([#2830](https://github.com/nf-core/tools/pull/2830))
 - Update GitHub Actions ([#2827](https://github.com/nf-core/tools/pull/2827))
 - Switch to setup-nf-test ([#2834](https://github.com/nf-core/tools/pull/2834))
diff --git a/nf_core/download.py b/nf_core/download.py
index d08e0ba40..5b06f3719 100644
--- a/nf_core/download.py
+++ b/nf_core/download.py
@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@
 import rich
 import rich.progress
 from git.exc import GitCommandError, InvalidGitRepositoryError
-from pkg_resources import parse_version as version_parser
+from packaging.version import Version
 
 import nf_core
 import nf_core.list
@@ -1664,9 +1664,7 @@ def tidy_tags_and_branches(self):
                     else:
                         # desired revisions may contain arbitrary branch names that do not correspond to valid sematic versioning patterns.
                         valid_versions = [
-                            version_parser(v)
-                            for v in desired_revisions
-                            if re.match(r"\d+\.\d+(?:\.\d+)*(?:[\w\-_])*", v)
+                            str(Version(v)) for v in desired_revisions if re.match(r"\d+\.\d+(?:\.\d+)*(?:[\w\-_])*", v)
                         ]
                         # valid versions sorted in ascending order, last will be aliased as "latest".
                         latest = sorted(valid_versions)[-1]