What Are the Top 5 Python Packages on PyPI? Surprising Rankings Revealed

Ever wondered which Python packages rank in the top five on PyPI? Contrary to common belief, NumPy and Pandas are not in the top five; NumPy is 17th and Pandas is outside the top 20 at the time of writing.

PyPI (Python Package Index) hosts over 578,000 packages. Below are the five most popular packages according to PYPL statistics.

boto3

boto3 is the official AWS SDK for Python, allowing developers to interact with Amazon services such as S3 and EC2. It simplifies API calls, offers comprehensive service coverage, and integrates with other Python libraries.

Install with: pip install boto3 After installation, set the required environment variables:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID – IAM user access key ID.

AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY – Corresponding secret access key.

urllib3

urllib3 is a user‑friendly Python HTTP client that adds features missing from the standard library, including thread safety, connection pooling, SSL/TLS verification, file uploads, retries, redirects, and support for various encodings and proxies.

Install with:

python -m pip install urllib3

Botocore

Botocore is the low‑level core library for AWS services and underpins the AWS CLI. It provides service definitions, request signing, and response handling.

Install with:

git clone https://github.com/boto/botocore.git
cd botocore
virtualenv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -e .
pip install botocore

aiobotocore

aiobotocore offers an asynchronous client for AWS services built on botocore and aiohttp, supporting services such as S3, DynamoDB, SNS, SQS, CloudFormation, and Kinesis.

Install with:

pip install pip-tools
pip-compile --all-extras pyproject.toml
pip-sync
pip install -e ".[awscli,boto3]"
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=xxx
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=XXX
export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=YYY

Requests

Requests is a simple HTTP library for Python that makes sending HTTP/1.1 requests easy, handling sessions, cookies, SSL verification, authentication, and more.

Install with: python -m pip install requests These top five packages may change over time, but AWS‑related packages are likely to remain prominent. Keep checking PyPI for updates.