Python Gui Design Tools And Ides

Top 10 Python GUI Frameworks for Developers

Best Python GUI frameworks for building interactive GUIs

The joy of coding Python should be in seeing short, concise, readable classes that express a lot of action in a small amount of clear code — not in reams of trivial code that bores the reader to death.

- Guido van Rossum

Graphical User Interface, or GUI, as it's more commonly known, is one of the three main cornerstones of any application, with the other two being security and performance. Maintaining the right balance between these three vital aspects can help you ensure an intuitive and seamless user experience. We can't stress enough how important it is to have a user interface that's minimalistic and, at the same time, robust. Gone are the days when developers would start losing their minds to create that perfect user interface in the absence of powerful tools like frameworks.

Due to P ython's increasing popularity, smooth learning curve, and widespread adoption in the real world, it makes for a compelling programming language to pick up in 2020. Soon after getting a firm grasp on the basics of Python programming, the next challenge beginners face is building the user interface. Luckily, there are a lot of frameworks for Python that specialize in helping developers build breathtaking yet highly intuitive user interfaces to go with modern applications.

The goal behind this article is to help anyone out there who's struggling to find the right framework for building interactive GUIs with the several GUI frameworks Python has to offer.

Did You Know?

According to Stackoverflow, Python is the most preferred language which means that the majority of developers use python.

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Best Python GUI Frameworks for Developers

Focussing on perfecting the user interface is a good thing but as much important it is to offer the best possible user experience , delivering it without spending an absurdly high amount of resources on it is equally important. Python has loads of frameworks for developing GUIs, and we have gathered some of the most popular Python GUI frameworks in our list that are listed below.

1. PyQt5

Developed By: Riverbank Computing
Website Link: https://riverbankcomputing.com/software/pyqt/intro

The PyQt package is built around the Qt framework, which is a cross-platform framework used for creating a plethora of applications for various platforms. The PyQt5 package includes a detailed set of bindings for Python based on the latest version v5 of the Qt application framework.

Similar to the Qt5 framework, PyQt5 is also fully cross-platform. By leveraging the power of PyQt5, developers can build applications for platforms like Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and more.

When it comes to creating GUIs, the PyQt5 arsenal offers the impressive QtGui and the QtDesigner module , which provide numerous visual elements that the developer can implement with a simple drag and drop. Of course, the option of creating these elements by code also exists, allowing you to create both small-scale as well as large-scale applications with ease. Python's modularity trickles down to PyQt5 in the form of extensions, giving you a lot more features than just GUI building. If you like what you see here, you can give PyQt5 a try with the command "pip install PyQt5".

2. Tkinter

Developed By: Fredrik Lundh
Website Link: https://wiki.python.org/moin/TkInter

Often referred to as the go-to GUI toolkit by a majority of Python developers, Tkinter was created to equip modern developers with a standard interface to the Tk GUI toolkit with its Python bindings. In Tkinter's world, most of the visual elements that we're familiar with are called widgets, and each of these widgets offers a different level of customizability.

Tkinter comes baked into current Python installers for all major operating systems and offers a host of commonly used elements that we're sure you must be familiar with. Some of those visual elements have been listed below:

● Frame: for providing a structure to your application

● Buttons: used for taking input from the user

● Checkbuttons: used for making selections

● Labels: for displaying textual information

● File Dialogs: for uploading or downloading files to/from the application

● Canvas: provides a space for drawing/painting things like graphs and plots

3. Kivy

Developed By: Kivy Organization
Website Link: https://kivy.org
Kivy Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMHK6NDVlCM&list=PLzMcBGfZo4-kSJVMyYeOQ8CXJ3z1k7gHn

Written with a mix of Python and Cython, Kivy is an open-source GUI framework for building some of the most intuitive user interfaces encompassing multi-touch applications that implement Natural User Interface(NUI).

A NUI is a kind of interface where the user naturally learns about the various interactions provided by a user interface while they're usually kept invisible.

With Kivy, interface designers can code once and deploy to multiple platforms, while the built-in support for OpenGL ES 2 allows them to use modern and powerful graphics and design techniques. The most common use of the Kivy GUI framework in the real-world can be seen in our Android and iOS applications. Other widespread implementations of the framework can be seen in the user interfaces of Linux, Windows, Raspberry Pi, and Mac OS devices. You can easily add this framework to your environment by following the installation instructions provided on their website.

4. wxPython

Developed By: Robin Dunn
Website Link: https://www.wxpython.org/
Tutorial Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMjV_HGLAQE

wxPython is essentially a Python extension module that acts as a wrapper for the wxWidgets API. wxPython allows Python developers to create native user interfaces that add zero additional overhead to the application. The cross-platform capabilities of wxPython allow deployment to platforms like Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Unix-based systems with little to no modifications.

The developer duo later released Project Phoenix as the successor to wxPython with support for Python 3. It has been built from the ground-up to offer a more cleaner Python implementation of the wxWidgets toolkit. If you're interested in giving this framework a try, you'd be happy to know that the latest update v4.1.1 has added it to the Python Package Index. With its addition to PyPI, the downloads have become much smoother with the command "pip install wxPython==4.1.1".

5. Libavg

Developed By: Alfred Bigler
Website Link: https://www.libavg.de/site/

Written in C++ by Ulrich Von Zadow, the open-source Libavg GUI framework uses Python as the scripting language of choice and serves as one of the best frameworks for developing user interfaces for modern touch-based devices. The graphics-intensive side of things such as video decoding, visual effects, and compositing, are all handled by the hardware-acceleration achieved via OpenGL and GPU shaders to deliver smooth and graphic-rich visuals.

libavg supports a majority of commonly used touch drivers and offers a range of features, such as camera support, text alignment, animation support, GPU effects like blur, shadows, and much more. There's also an advanced screen layout engine that offers rotation, scaling, cropping, blending modes, and other manipulation techniques for visual elements.

Being built with C++ to ensure incredibly fast execution times, developers who want the absolute best performance out of their application will not be disappointed with libavg. You can find the installation instructions on their website's downloads page.

6. PySimpleGUI

Developed By: Mike B
Website Link: https://pysimplegui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Isn't the name of this framework a dead giveaway of what it is meant to do? Getting back to the topic, those starting fresh with Python application development may find a lot of Python GUI frameworks daunting at first. Mike B. created PySimpleGUI in 2018 to make it easier for Python newbies to get into GUI development without spending too much time getting into the intricacies of the more advanced GUI development options available.

PySimpleGUI takes 4 of the widely popular Python GUI frameworks, which include Qt, Tkinter, WxPython, and Remi, and turns down their difficulty a few notches by implementing most of the boilerplate code. Result?

Beginners get the option to pick the GUI framework of their choice along with easy access to the various visual elements that come with it to create intuitive user interfaces without diving deep into the frameworks. This doesn't mean seasoned developers will only get access to the simplified versions of their favorite frameworks, the option to get full native functionality still exists.

7. PyForms

Website Link: https://pyforms.readthedocs.io/en/v4/

The PyForms GUI framework is a Python software layer at its core for the widely famous Windows Forms, which allows developers to create some amazing and highly interactive user interfaces. PyForms' cross-platform capabilities make it easier for the developers to create applications for multiple platforms with little changes to the code, eliminating unnecessary slowdowns. PyForms provides instances of several popular graphic-centric libraries, such as PyQt, OpenGL , and more, to help developers create user interfaces for their applications.

The PyForms library is split into 3 different sections that include PyForms-GUI, PyForms-Web, and PyForms-Terminal. Each of these layers allows the execution of the PyForms application in Web, Terminal, and as Windows GUI. With a focus on modularity, PyForms becomes perfect for quickly creating prototypes, and it can also make short work of the maintenance at later stages of the application. Installation is handled with the command "pip install pyforms", which adds all the three libraries, or if you want to use the libraries individually, that's possible too.

8. Wax

Website Link: https://wiki.python.org/moin/Wax

Remember the framework called wxPython that we discussed a few pointers ago? Just like wxPython was a wrapper for the wxWidgets GUI toolkit, the wax GUI framework is a more developer-friendly wrapper of wxPython. Like other popular frameworks, wax is also implemented as an extension module for Python. And for those wondering, yes, wax supports building cross-platform applications.

The idea behind wax is to offer application developers a more simpler access to the Python elements and objects for building GUIs by removing the low-level aspects of wxPython. As the underlying platform wxWindows is extremely efficient as it is, the wax GUI framework enjoys the same level of efficiency and speed as it uses the native widgets provided by the platform.

9. PySide2

Developed By: The Qt Company
Website Link: https://www.qt.io/qt-for-python

PySide2 is built by the same company that gave us the widely popular application development framework Qt. Upon looking closely, you'll come across the term "Qt for Python Project", which is nothing but the task of porting PySide to support Qt5, whereas the framework itself is now being called PySide2.

It is now being dubbed as the official cross-platform Python module for the Qt for Python project. The project provides Python developers access to a proven collection of tools and libraries for the fast and flexible creation of amazing user interface tools that Qt5 and above has to offer.

PySide2 also offers powerful community support for the developers who are looking for it. PySide2's documentation section has been divided into areas like tutorials, video guides, examples, API docs, and more, to extensively cover the variety of topics included in the framework. AMD's Radeon Control Software, cockpit entertainment solutions for Mercedes Mini Cooper, and TomTom's Navigation Systems are just some of the high-tech and modern examples running on Qt.

10. PyGUI

Developed by: Dr. Gregory Ewing
Website Link: https://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing/python_gui/

The Python GUI Project, or the PyGUI framework as it is more commonly known, is a simple API that enables developers to create user interfaces using native elements for Python applications. Being a fairly lightweight API, the PyGUI framework adds very little additional code between the Python application and the target platform. PyGUI currently supports creating applications for Unix-based systems, Windows machines, and Mac OS devices.

To make application development even easier for developers, the documentation for the entire library is in Python, eliminating the need to refer to other GUI libraries. PyGUI is available for Python 2 & 3 and yes, it does come with support for extensions that let you use OpenGL and GTK.