I have released a python package “pyreadstat” that reads SPSS (sav, zsav and por), Stata and SAS files. It is a wrapper around the C library ReadStat so it is very fast. Readstat is the library used in the back of the R library Haven, which is widely used and very robust.
The package is autocontained. It does not require using R (no need to install an aditional application) and it does not depend on IBM dlls or other external libraries.
For example, in order to read a SPSS sav file you would do:
import pyreadstat
df, meta = pyreadstat.read_sav("/path/to/sav/file.sav")
df is a pandas dataframe. Meta contains metadata such as variable labels or value labels.
read_sav reads both sav and zsav (compressed) files. There is also a function read_por for old por (portable) files.
You can find it here: https://github.com/Roche/pyreadstat