How to make a progress bar in Python

The fastest answer: tqdm

tqdm is the default choice for most Python scripts. You import tqdm from tqdm, wrap your existing loop and it prints a working bar with a percentage, count, ETA and rate.

# pip install tqdm
from time import sleep
from tqdm import tqdm

for item in tqdm(range(100), desc="working"):
    sleep(0.02)

Version 4.70.1 came out on 2026-09-11 under the MPL-2.0 AND MIT licences, runs on Python 3.8+ and has about 31,400 GitHub stars. Beyond basic loops it includes Jupyter widgets, progress_apply for pandas and process_map for worker pools. If your script might run in a cron job or write to a file, pass disable=None to turn the bar off when output isn't a terminal. The tqdm guide covers the parameters in detail.

A progress bar with only the standard library

A text progress bar works by redrawing the same line over and over. You write a carriage return ("\r") to move the cursor back to the start of the line, write the updated bar, then flush stdout so the terminal shows it right away. To size the bar, shutil.get_terminal_size() gives you the terminal width and falls back to 80 columns.

import shutil
import sys
import time

def progress(done, total):
    width = max(10, shutil.get_terminal_size().columns - 20)
    filled = int(width * done / total)
    bar = "#" * filled + "-" * (width - filled)
    sys.stdout.write(f"\r[{bar}] {done}/{total} {done / total:4.0%}")
    sys.stdout.flush()
    if done == total:
        sys.stdout.write("\n")

for i in range(1, 101):
    time.sleep(0.02)
    progress(i, 100)

A short function like this is fine when you can't run pip install, but it won't handle a few things for you:

• ETA: it shows how far along you are, not how much time is left.
• Logs that are not a terminal: in a log file or a pipe, the carriage-return redraws pile up on one huge line or show as many separate lines.
• Nested bars: an outer and an inner loop overwrite the same line and garble the output.

rich: coloured bars and several tasks

rich is a whole terminal formatting library, and progress bars are one feature in it. It's at version 15.0.0 (released 2026-04-12), uses the MIT licence, supports Python 3.9+ and has about 57,700 GitHub stars.

For a one-liner that feels like tqdm, import track from rich.progress and wrap your loop:

import time
from rich.progress import track

for item in track(range(100), description="Working..."):
    time.sleep(0.02)

When you need several tasks on screen at once, use the Progress class instead of track.

alive-progress, click and progressbar2

Depending on what else your script does, one of these three can fit better than tqdm or rich.

alive-progress

alive-progress (3.3.0, released 2025-07-20, MIT licence, Python 3.9+, about 6,300 GitHub stars) focuses on animated bars and spinners. You can wrap an iterable with alive_it(items), or open a context manager with with alive_bar(total) as bar: and call bar() once per item.

import time
from alive_progress import alive_bar

items = range(100)
with alive_bar(len(items)) as bar:
    for item in items:
        time.sleep(0.02)
        bar()

click

If your script is already a click command line tool, you don't need another dependency to show progress. click 8.5.0 (2026-08-26, BSD-3-Clause, Python 3.10+) has a built-in bar:

import time
import click

with click.progressbar(range(100), label="Working") as bar:
    for item in bar:
        time.sleep(0.02)

progressbar2

progressbar2 is at version 4.6.0 (2026-08-14), under the BSD-3-Clause licence for Python 3.10+, with about 880 GitHub stars. The install name is progressbar2, but the import name in your code is progressbar. It can also show several bars at once with MultiBar.

import time
import progressbar

for item in progressbar.progressbar(range(100)):
    time.sleep(0.02)

Which library to pick

Here is how the options compare on version, licence, Python requirement and where each one fits best:

If you just want a bar that works everywhere, pick tqdm. If you already use rich for coloured output or click for command line arguments, use the bar you already have installed. For a longer comparison with enlighten and spinners, see tqdm alternatives.

See the bar when you are away from the terminal

A terminal bar is only useful while you're looking at that terminal. When a job runs on a server or overnight, you need the progress somewhere else.