PyQt or PySide - which one to use

python pyqt pyside
shutefan picture shutefan · Jul 31, 2011 · Viewed 51.3k times · Source

I started learning a bit of python and would now like to toy around a bit with gui-building. Qt seems to be a good choice because of its cross-platformishness.
Now there seem to be two bindings available: PyQt by Riverbank Computing and PySide, originally developed by Nokia.
So which one should I choose? All I can find are two year old feature comparisons, but what differences are there nowadays?
Which one is easier to use, has more/better documentation? Are both still in active development?
Licensing isn't of much concern to me since I don't intend to write commercial applications.

Answer

lunaryorn picture lunaryorn · Jul 31, 2011

Both toolkits are actively maintained, and by now more or less equal in features and quality. There are only few, rather unimportant differences.

Still, I'd recommend PySide for Python 2. It has a more reasonable API, mainly it doesn't expose Qt types, which have a direct equivalent in Python (e.g. QString, QList, etc.) or which are completely superfluous due to Python's dynamic nature, like QVariant. This avoids many tedious conversions to and from Qt types, and thus eases programming and avoids many errors.

PyQt also supports this modern API, and uses it by default for Python 3, but not for Python 2 to maintain backwards compatibility.

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