15 Must‑Try Python Packages Every Developer Should Know

Why I like Python? For beginners it is simple and easy to learn, and it offers a massive ecosystem of third‑party libraries—over 230,000 user‑contributed packages that make Python truly powerful and popular.

In this article I selected the 15 most useful packages and introduced their functions and characteristics.

1. Dash

Dash is a relatively new package that is ideal for building data‑visualization apps entirely in Python, making it suitable for anyone handling data. It combines Flask, Plotly.js, and React.js.

2. Pygame

Pygame is a Python wrapper for the SDL multimedia library, which provides low‑level access to:

Audio

Keyboard

Mouse

Gamepad

Graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D

Pygame is highly portable and runs on almost all platforms and operating systems. Although it includes a full game engine, you can also use the library directly from Python scripts to play MP3 files.

3. Pillow

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

Here is a quick code example that loads and renders an image:

4. Colorama

Colorama lets you use colors in the terminal, which is very handy for Python scripts. Its documentation is short and fun and can be found on the Colorama PyPI page.

5. JMESPath

Python works well with JSON because the mapping to Python dictionaries is natural. While Python’s built‑in json module is fine, JMESPath makes extracting elements from JSON documents explicit and powerful.

Below are some basic examples to illustrate its capabilities:

6. Requests

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

The following code example shows how easy it is to use Requests.

Requests can handle many advanced tasks, such as:

Authentication

Using cookies

Executing POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.

Custom certificates

Session handling

Proxies

7. Simplejson

Python’s built‑in json module is actually a bundled version of simplejson. Using simplejson offers advantages:

Supports more Python versions

Updates more frequently than the standard library version

Contains an optional C‑implemented part, making it very fast

Because of these facts, you often see simplejson used in scripts that handle JSON.

I only use the default json module unless you specifically need speed or features not present in the standard library.

8. Emoji

The Emoji library is fun and useful for media data analysis, even if not everyone likes emojis.

Here is a simple code example:

9. Chardet

The chardet module can detect the character set of files or data streams, which is handy when analyzing large amounts of random text or handling data from remote downloads.

10. Python‑dateutil

python‑dateutil provides powerful extensions to the standard datetime module, handling relative deltas, recurrence rules, time zones, and more.

Examples include calculating relative dates such as “next month”, “last week”, or Easter Sunday for any year.

11. Progress bars: progress and tqdm

Both packages help you create progress bars quickly and reliably.

progress

This package lets you easily create progress bars.

tqdm

tqdm offers similar functionality and is newer, often demonstrated with GIF animations.

12. IPython

IPython is an enhanced interactive shell for Python, offering features such as comprehensive object introspection, persistent input history, output caching, tab completion, magic commands, session recording, debugger integration, and even parallel and distributed computing.

It is the core of Jupyter Notebook, an open‑source web application for creating and sharing documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text.

13. Homeassistant

I enjoy home automation as a hobby. Home Assistant bundles all house systems into one platform and can also be installed as a Python PyPI package.

Most of our lights and blinds are automated.

We monitor natural gas usage, electricity consumption, and solar panel production.

We can track most phones and trigger actions when they enter a region, such as turning on the garage light when I arrive home.

It can control entertainment systems like Samsung TVs and Sonos speakers.

It automatically discovers most devices on the network, making setup very easy.

After three years of daily use, Home Assistant remains in testing but is the best platform I’ve tried, offering free, open‑source integration and control of various devices and protocols.

14. Flask

Flask is my go‑to library for creating quick web services or simple websites. It is a micro‑framework that keeps the core simple yet extensible, with over 700 official and community extensions.

If you plan to develop a large web application, you might consider a more complete framework such as Django.

15. BeautifulSoup

If you scrape HTML from websites, you need a parser to extract the content you want. Beautiful Soup is a Python library for parsing HTML and XML, providing easy navigation, searching, and modification of the parse tree, and handling broken markup gracefully.

Key features include automatic Unicode conversion, integration with popular parsers like lxml and html5lib, and simple APIs for finding links, tables, and other elements.

Automatically converts incoming documents to Unicode and outgoing documents to UTF‑8.

Works on top of popular parsers, allowing flexible parsing strategies.

Provides high‑level methods such as “find all links” or “find table headers with bold text”.