Comparison of Python QR Code libraries

Features

Description	qrcode	qrcodegen	Segno
Library license	BSD	MIT	BSD
Library version	7.4.2	1.8.0	1.6.1
Mode Numeric	Yes	Yes	Yes
Mode Alphanumeric	Yes	Yes	Yes
Mode Byte	Yes	Yes	Yes
Mode Kanji	No	Yes	Yes
Mode ECI	No	Yes	Yes
Mode FNC1	No	No	No
Mode Structured Append	No	No	Yes
Mode Hanzi [1]	No	No	Yes
Mixing modes	Yes	Yes	Yes
QR Codes version 1 - 40	Yes	Yes	Yes
Micro QR Codes version M1 - M4	No	No	Yes
Output acc. to ISO/IEC 18004:2015(E) Fig. 1 [2]	No	No	Yes
Output acc. to ISO/IEC 18004:2015(E) Fig. 2			Yes
Find maximal error correction level	No	Yes	Yes
Optimize QR Codes	Yes	No	No
PNG output	Yes	No	Yes
SVG output	Yes	No	Yes
EPS output	Yes	No	Yes
PDF output	Yes	No	Yes
PAM output	No	No	Yes
PBM output	Yes	No	Yes
PPM output	Yes	No	Yes
LaTeX support	No	No	Yes
XBM output	Yes	No	Yes
XPM output	No	No	Yes
PNG data URI	No	No	Yes
SVG data URI	No	No	Yes
Text output	Yes	No	Yes
ANSI escape code output	Yes	No	Yes
Other output formats (i.e. JPEG)	Yes	No	Yes via plugin
Black and white QR Codes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Colored QR Codes	Yes	No	Yes
Animated QR Codes (GIF, APNG, WebP)	No	No	Yes via plugin
Changing size of modules (scaling factor)	Yes	No	Yes
Command line script	Yes	No	Yes
Plugins	No	No	Yes
Default encoding in Byte mode	ISO/IEC 8859-1 or UTF-8	ISO/IEC 8859-1 or UTF-8	ISO/IEC 8859-1 or UTF-8
3rd party dependencies	Pillow or Pymaging and Pymaging-PNG (Windows: colorama)

[1]

The Hanzi mode is not part of ISO/IEC 18004 and may not be supported by all QR Code decoders. Segno uses the Hanzi mode if the user enables it explicitly, see Hanzi mode for details

[2]

Even if all libs generate the same byte output (40 e5 15 22 04 36 f6 46 52 05 37 96 d6 26 f6 c0) for the input “QR Code Symbol”, the generated QR code may look different because they choose a different mask pattern. ISO/IEC 18004:2015(E) (cf. page 7) uses mask 5, while qrcode and qrcodegen use mask 4. All these QR codes can be read by common QR Code readers.

Performance

Some performance indicators. The script benchmarks.py ran on Intel i7-8559U / CPython 3.11. Each SVG / PNG image uses a scaling factor of 10 (aside from qrcodegen which does not support any scaling).

Create a 1-M QR code

1-M QR code encoding “QR Code Symbol”

Create a 7-Q QR code

7-Q QR code encoding “QR Code Symbol”

Create a 30-H QR code

30-H QR code encoding “QR Code Symbol”

Create a QR code and serialize it as SVG

Create a QR code 1-M “QR Code Symbol” and serialize it as SVG document.

Create a QR code and serialize it as PNG

Create a QR code 1-M “QR Code Symbol” and serialize it as PNG image.

The comparison included PyQRCode in all years before 2022. In the meantime, six years have passed without any updates and PyQRCode has lost its connection in many aspects.

Although popular, it lost all feature and performance comparisons, therefore it is no longer part of this comparison.