PyQt5 vs PySide2

Coding
, , ,
1

So I’m a little late on the ball here. I come back to Maya once in a while for hobby purposes.
But I’m wondering about the reason for using PyQt5.
As Maya comes with Pyside2 pre-installed, every UI you create will work for anyone running Maya(given the version supports PySide2) whereas PyQt5 has to be installed manually. So if you were to distribute the scripts, anyone looking to use it too has to install PyQt5 themselves.

I’m not sure what benefits come with using PyQt5. I’ve understoodf it’s the commercial license. So if you’re looking to sell software developed with Qt you have to pay a license fee for PyQt5? But you can also use PyQt5 for free? You can use Qt Designer? Maybe support for advanced and different widgets?

2

Both PySide2 and PyQt5 have a commercial license that you can purchase from their respective owners.

The primary difference is in their non-commercial licensing, PySide2 is primarily licenses under the LGPL (some bits are GPL) while PyQt5 is 100% GPL.

There are also probably some minor API and stability issues as well, but I’ve been out of the comparison game so I’ve lost track of what those are.

1 Like
3

Thank you, it’s clearer, but I need to read up on the licenses.
Still would like to understand why you’d want to use PyQt5 instead of PySide2.

4

I think the primary reason to choose PyQt5 is that at least early on it, it existed and PySide2 wasn’t ready yet. At this point, I’m not sure, it’s possible the commercial license(s) are cheaper, or it could be more stable (honestly don’t know).

2 Likes
5

Thank you.
I was just curious because I just saw recent tutorials on how to install it for Maya.

6

We use PyQt5 at work.
The reason we use PyQt5 at work is because we used to use PyQt4 at work because PySide didn’t exist yet. Also we’ve written C++ libraries that use sip instead of shiboken, and that’s quite a bit more difficult to change.
There are slight differences between the API’s, and slight differences in the behaviors of the sip/shiboken parts, but those are easily worked around.
And 99% of those workarounds are already handled in GitHub - mottosso/Qt.py: Minimal Python 2 & 3 shim around all Qt bindings - PySide, PySide2, PyQt4 and PyQt5. so I don’t have to deal with them! (There’s also a Qt5.py library, but I don’t have experience with it)

So, in other words, Bob was exactly right!

I believe it is 100% fine to just use PySide2 and be done with it.

4 Likes