If you've been following along with the PyQt5 tutorials on this site, you may have noticed that some of them refer to Qt Creator rather than Qt Designer. This can be a little confusing, especially if you've only installed Qt Designer as a standalone tool. So let's clear that up.
Qt Creator vs. Qt Designer
Qt Creator is the full integrated development environment (IDE) for Qt. It bundles together several tools — a code editor, a debugger, project management features, and a visual UI designer — into one application.
Qt Designer is just the visual UI designer part. It's the tool you use to drag and drop widgets, build layouts, and create .ui files.
Here's the thing: the Qt Designer component inside Qt Creator is identical to the standalone Qt Designer application. They share the same interface, the same widgets, and the same functionality. When a tutorial shows you how to do something in Qt Creator's design view, you're looking at Qt Designer.
So is there any advantage to using Qt Creator?
Not really — at least not for what we're doing with PyQt5.
Qt Creator adds project management features and a C++ code editor that are useful if you're developing Qt applications in C++. But for Python GUI development with PyQt5, you don't need any of that. The standalone Qt Designer gives you everything you need to create and edit .ui files.
There are a few very small exceptions where the two tools differ. For example, Qt Creator has some extra features when working with project-managed resources (.qrc files tied to a Qt Creator project). But these differences are minor and won't affect your ability to follow along with any of the tutorials here.
Which should you use?
Use whichever you have installed. If you already have Qt Creator, great — you can use the design view within it. If you only have the standalone Qt Designer, that works just as well. The steps in the tutorials apply to both.
Packaging Python Applications with PyInstaller by Martin Fitzpatrick — This step-by-step guide walks you through packaging your own Python applications from simple examples to complete installers and signed executables.
If you're installing from scratch and only plan to use Python with PyQt5, the standalone Qt Designer is the lighter option. You can install Qt Designer as a standalone tool via the pyqt5-tools package:
pip install pyqt5-tools
This gives you Qt Designer without the overhead of the full Qt Creator IDE.
Summary
Qt Creator and Qt Designer share the same UI design tool under the hood. Any tutorial that references Qt Creator's designer view can be followed using the standalone Qt Designer, and vice versa. Pick whichever is most convenient for you and carry on building your PyQt5 applications. To get started, check out our first steps with Qt Designer tutorial, or learn how to design your GUI layout with Qt Designer.
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