# PySimpleGUI

6 Hacker News commenters recommended PySimpleGUI and 8 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 1 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it for quickly building compact GUIs in Python without learning GTK, win32 or Qt. It was relicensed commercial and later returned to open source under LGPL 3.0.

## Why people recommend it

- Simple way to build small GUIs (2 comments): "It made writting compact GUIs for smaller projects manageable without going into the deeps of GTK, win32 or QT." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063483)) "This is why PySimpleGUI is nice...you can make a button!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48052761))
- Free again under LGPL 3.0 (2 comments): "A nice gesture of sorts to make it available to everyone after the updates made during the commercial phase." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48052326)) "Great to see this back as Open Source (LGPL 3.0)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48052334))

## What people warn about

- Commercial phase made it fragile (3 comments): "I stopped using this when the dev did their rugpull and won't go back." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48052809)) "N E V E R Use code that can "stop working" until you pay ransom." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48053519)) "it just stopped working! Pretty annoying." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058494))
- Distrust of maintainer's motives (4 comments): "I suspect that the owner had his mind on commercialization from the very beginning" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48053750)) "then somehow leverage their position as a FOSS maintainer transform it to non-FOSS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48061551)) "starting out as a community project and then closing doors to make money from it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48052166))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Qt](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qt.md): 191 recommend
- [GTK](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gtk.md): 85 recommend
- [Windows Forms](https://hackerapproved.com/p/winforms.md): 76 recommend
- [SwiftUI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/swiftui.md): 75 recommend
- [Tcl/Tk](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tcl-tk.md): 61 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "PySimpleGUI", https://hackerapproved.com/p/pysimplegui/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).