15 Must‑Try Python Packages Every Developer Should Know

Why I love Python: it is a simple, easy‑to‑learn language, and the huge ecosystem of over 230,000 third‑party packages makes it truly powerful and popular.

In this article I selected the 15 most useful packages and introduce their features and characteristics.

1. Dash

Dash is a relatively new package, ideal for building data‑visualisation apps in pure Python; it combines Flask, Plotly.js and React.js.

2. Pygame

Pygame is a Python wrapper for the SDL multimedia library, providing low‑level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, gamepad, and graphics hardware (OpenGL/Direct3D).

Audio

Keyboard

Mouse

Gamepad

Graphics hardware (OpenGL/Direct3D)

Pygame is highly portable and runs on almost all platforms; besides a full game engine you can also play MP3 files directly from Python scripts.

3. Pillow

Pillow is dedicated to image processing; you can create thumbnails, convert between formats, rotate, apply filters, display images, and perform batch operations on many images.

Example code (loading and rendering an image) is shown below.

4. Colorama

Colorama lets you use colors in the terminal, perfect for Python scripts; its documentation is short and fun.

5. JmesPath

JmesPath makes extracting elements from JSON documents easy by allowing you to specify exactly what to retrieve.

6. Requests

Requests builds on urllib3, the most downloaded Python library, making web requests simple, powerful, and versatile.

Below is a simple code example showing how easy Requests is to use.

Requests can handle advanced tasks such as authentication, cookies, POST/PUT/DELETE, custom certificates, sessions, and proxies.

Authentication

Cookies

POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.

Custom certificates

Session handling

Proxy support

7. Simplejson

Simplejson is a faster, more frequently updated drop‑in replacement for Python’s built‑in json module, with optional C acceleration.

Works on more Python versions

Updates more frequently than the built‑in version

Has an optional C implementation for speed

Because of these advantages you’ll often see it used in scripts that process large amounts of JSON.

8. Emoji

The Emoji library is fun and useful for media data analysis, allowing easy handling of emoji characters.

Simple code example is shown below.

9. Chardet

Chardet detects the character set of files or data streams, useful when processing large amounts of random text or unknown‑encoding remote data.

10. Python‑dateutil

python‑dateutil extends the standard datetime module with powerful features such as relative deltas, recurrence rules, and comprehensive timezone handling.

For more capabilities see the full documentation.

Compute relative deltas (next month, next year, next Monday, last week of month, etc.)

Calculate recurrence dates using iCalendar‑style rules

Handle tzfile, /etc/localtime, zoneinfo files, TZ strings, iCalendar files, and Windows registry timezones

Compute Easter Sunday for any year using Western, Orthodox, or Julian algorithms

11. Progress and tqdm

Both packages create progress bars; tqdm is newer and offers a richer feature set.

Progress example:

tqdm example (GIF animation shown):

12. IPython

IPython provides an enhanced interactive shell with features such as introspection, persistent history, output caching, tab completion, magic commands, session recording, debugger integration, and support for parallel and distributed computing.

IPython is the core of Jupyter Notebook, enabling real‑time code, visualisations, and narrative text.

13. Homeassistant

Home Assistant bundles all home‑automation systems into a single Python package, allowing control of lights, blinds, energy monitoring, device tracking, entertainment systems, and automatic device discovery.

It can be installed via PyPI and runs well on Raspberry Pi or Docker.

14. Flask

Flask is a micro‑framework for quickly creating web services or simple sites; it keeps the core simple yet extensible, with over 700 official and community extensions.

For larger applications consider a full‑stack framework like Django.

15. BeautifulSoup

Beautiful Soup parses HTML and XML, providing simple navigation, search, and modification of the parse tree; it handles broken markup gracefully and integrates with parsers like lxml and html5lib.

Key features include automatic Unicode handling, flexible parser selection, and powerful searching capabilities.

Automatic conversion to Unicode and UTF‑8

Works with popular parsers (lxml, html5lib)

Easy searching (e.g., find all links, extract bold table headers)