The 22 Most-Used Python Packages in The World in 2021

Educational and surprising insights into how Python is used

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How is Python being used around the globe and across industries?

This question inspired me to write this piece. I figured a list of the most-used Python packages would give a good indication.

As a starting point, I took a list of the most downloaded Python packages on PyPI over the past 365 days. Let’s dive in and find out what they do, how they’re related, and why they rank so high!

1. Urllib3

1B downloads

Urllib3 is an HTTP client for Python that brings many features that are missing from the Python standard libraries:

• Thread safety.
• Connection pooling.
• Client-side SSL/TLS verification.
• File uploads with multipart encoding.
• Helpers for retrying requests and dealing with HTTP redirects.
• Support for gzip and deflate encoding.
• Proxy support for HTTP and SOCKS.

Despite its name, Urllib3 is not a successor of urllib2, which is part of Python’s core. If you want to use as many core Python features as possible, perhaps…