What the 2025 PSF & JetBrains Python Survey Reveals About Python’s Growing Popularity

2025 PSF & JetBrains Python Developer Survey Highlights

In August 2025 the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and JetBrains released the eighth Python Developer Survey, gathering responses from over 30,000 developers—the largest survey to date.

After filtering out spam and respondents under 18, about 29,000 valid replies remained.

Seventy‑two percent of participants use Python for professional development, while the remainder are educators or hobbyists, indicating a steady rise in Python’s popularity.

Combined with the latest Stack Overflow survey, Python’s usage grew 7 %; half of respondents have less than two years of professional coding experience and 39 % started using Python within the past two years.

PSF researcher Michael Kennedy noted that only 15 % of developers have adopted the newest 3.13 release. He argues that a universal upgrade could save millions in cloud costs and benefit the environment, especially since 53 % use containers and 28 % use serverless platforms.

Conversely, many developers stay on older versions because the current version meets their needs (53 %), due to compatibility concerns (27 %) or lack of time (25 %).

The most widely used versions are Python 3.12 (35 %) and 3.11 (21 %), mirroring last year’s pattern.

Because many Python applications rely on native‑code extensions, precise efficiency gains from newer releases are hard to quantify.

Python’s usage in web development (46 %) and data analysis (48 %) is almost equal and both have risen slightly year over year. Including machine learning (41 %) and data engineering (31 %), Python remains dominant, with Django (35 %) and Flask (34 %) close competitors and FastAPI jumping to 38 %.

The Rust‑based tool uv, positioned as a pip alternative, has reached an 11 % adoption rate.

In the IDE arena, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code leads with 48 % popularity, surpassing JetBrains’ PyCharm at 25 %.

Earlier this month the PSF announced a pause to its sponsorship program due to funding shortfalls driven by rising PyCon US costs and higher operational expenses, resulting in a net loss of $1.462 million for FY 2024.

The PSF continues to support the Python ecosystem through PyPI, distribution, events, and funding CPython developers.

Community outreach manager Marie Nordin emphasizes that companies building profitable software on Python need to provide more support and resources.