17 Reasons Why Gradio Isn't Just Another UI Library

Introduction

"Oh, Gradio? That's a Python library for building UIs, right?"

We hear this a lot, and while Gradio does let you create interactive UIs with minimal Python code, calling Gradio a "UI library" misses the bigger picture! Gradio is more than a UI library—it's a framework for interacting with machine learning models through both UIs and APIs, providing strong guarantees around performance, security, and responsiveness.

In this article, we'll introduce features that are unique to Gradio and explain how they are essential for building powerful AI applications. We'll share links to Gradio's official documentation and release notes, so you can explore further if you're curious.

1. Universal API Access

All Gradio apps are also APIs! When you build a Gradio app, you can also use Gradio's robust client libraries for programmatic access to these Gradio applications. We offer:

• Official SDKs in Python (gradio_client) and JavaScript (@gradio/client), plus support for cURL API access
• Automatic generation of REST API endpoints for each event defined in your Gradio app
• Automatically-generated API documentation, accessible through the "View API" link
• Client libraries with advanced features like file handling, Hugging Face Space duplication, and more

Further Reading: Explore Client Libraries, Querying Gradio Apps with Curl

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Most other Python frameworks lack official API access mechanisms
• While traditional web frameworks require separate implementations for UI and API endpoints, Gradio automatically generates both from a single implementation, including documentation.

2. Interactive API Recorder for Development

Gradio's "API Recorder" was introduced in version 4.26. This powerful development tool enables developers to capture their UI interactions in real time and automatically generate corresponding API calls in Python or JavaScript.

• "API Recorder" can be found on the "View API" page discussed above.
• It helps in documenting API usage of Gradio applications through your own real examples

Further Reading: Explore API Recorder

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• You cannot easily script UI interactions in this manner in most other Python and Web frameworks. This is a capability unique to Gradio in the ML tooling landscape.
• The combination of API Recorder with Gradio Client libraries creates a smooth transition from UI exploration to development using API endpoints.

3. Fast ML Apps with Server-Side Rendering

Gradio 5.0 introduced server-side rendering (SSR), changing how ML applications load and perform. While traditional UI frameworks rely on client-side rendering, Gradio's SSR:

• Eliminates the loading spinner and significantly reduces initial page load times
• Pre-renders the UI on the server, enabling immediate user interaction
• Improves SEO for published applications
• Gets automatically enabled for Hugging Face Spaces deployments while remaining configurable for local development

Further Reading: Read more about Gradio 5's SSR

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Traditional Python UI frameworks are limited to client-side rendering while implementing SSR in JS web frameworks requires extensive full-stack development expertise
• Gradio delivers web framework-level performance while maintaining a pure Python development experience (Note: except for having to installing Node!)

4. Automatic Queue Management for ML Tasks

Gradio provides a sophisticated queuing system tailored for ML applications that handles both GPU-intensive computations and high-volume user access.

• Gradio's queue automatically handles different kinds of tasks defined in your application, whether they are long predictions that run on a GPU, audio/video streaming, or non-ML tasks.
• Your applications can scale to thousands of concurrent users without resource contention and system overwhelming
• Real-time queue status updates via Server-Side Events, showing users their current position in the queue.
• You can configure concurrency limits for parallel processing of requests
• You can even have different events pool resources through shared queues using concurrency_id

Further Reading: Learn about Queuing, Explore Concurrency Controls

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Most other Python frameworks don't offer resource management while running concurrent sessions. If you are using popular web frameworks, you might have to implement queuing system manually yourself.
• Gradio's built-in queue management system eliminates the need for external schedulers and allows you to build GPU-intensive or viral ML applications.

5. High-Performance Streaming for Real-Time ML Outputs

Gradio's streaming capabilities enable real-time, low-latency updates crucial for modern ML applications. The framework provides:

• A simple developer experience: Gradio offers streaming through simple Python generators using yield statements.
• This supports token-by-token text generation streaming, step-by-step image generation updates, or even smooth audio/video streaming via HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol
• WebRTC/WebSocket API for real-time applications via FastRTC

Further Reading: Implementation guide, Learn more about Gradio 5's streaming improvements

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Other Python frameworks require manual thread management and polling for streaming updates. Web frameworks similarly need custom WebSocket or WebRTC implementation for real-time streaming.
• You can create real-time audio/video streaming applications entirely in Python with FastRTC and Gradio.

6. Integrated Multi-Page Application Support

Gradio has evolved beyond single-page applications with its native multi-page support, enabling developers to build comprehensive AI/ML applications.

• You can have multiple pages within a single application context
• Gradio provide automatic URL routing and navigation bar generation
• Backend resources, such as the queue, are shared across pages
• Developers can split code across multiple files while maintaining a single application context. This is good for file maintainability and testing.

Further Reading: Explore Multi-Page Apps, Learn about page organization

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Other Python frameworks require separate scripts for each page, limiting state sharing among the pages. Popular Web frameworks also require explicit routing setup.
• Gradio offers automatic routing and navigation bar using simple Python declarations! This feature transforms Gradio from a demo platform into a robust web framework for building full-featured ML applications.

7. New Client-Side Function Execution With Groovy

Gradio 5 introduces an automatic Python-to-JavaScript transpilation library called Groovy. This now enables instant UI responsiveness without server roundtrips.

• Python functions can do simple UI updates directly within the browser with js=True flag
• Used mainly for immediate updates of various Component properties
• This eliminates latency for simple UI interactions
• Reduces server load for basic interface updates. Especially useful for viral hosted apps or when using apps on high latency connections.
• Enables developers to write highly responsive applications without JavaScript expertise

Further Reading: Read about Client-Side Functions

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Most other Python frameworks require server roundtrips for all UI updates. Popular Web frameworks implement separate JavaScript codebase for client-side logic.
• Gradio's automatic transpilation from Python to JavaScript provides a single-language development experience while delivering web-native performance—a combination not found in other frameworks.

8. A Comprehensive Theming System and Modern UI Components

Gradio offers a sophisticated theming system that can transform your ML applications into polished, professional-looking interfaces.

• Gradio has ready-to-use theme presets like Monochrome, Soft, Ocean, Glass etc. These themes have built-in dark mode support too.
• All Gradio themes are automatically mobile responsive and we've made sure that your Gradio apps are automatically accessible for people using screen readers.
• Gradio Components come with ML-specific UI choices, for example, we provide Undo/Retry/Like buttons for chat interfaces, ImageEditor and AnnotatedImage components for segmentation/masking use-cases, ImageSlider for image-to-image transformations, and so on
• Gradio has recently introduced enhanced UI features for Reasoning LLMs, Agents, Multistep Agents, Nested Thoughts, and Nested Agents within our chat interfaces, elevating AI Agents to a first-class status in the chat UI.

Further Reading: Explore Gradio Themes, See the UI Refresh, Build UIs for Agents

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Other Python frameworks offer very limited color customization without comprehensive theming. You will have to implement theme management and CSS manually in all popular Web frameworks.
• With Gradio ML practitioners can create professional-looking applications without web design expertise while maintaining the flexibility to implement custom branding when needed.

9. Gradio's Dynamic Interfaces

With the introduction of the @gr.render() decorator, the components and event listeners you define in your Gradio application are no longer fixed—you can add new components and listeners dynamically based on user interaction and state.

• You can now render UI modifications on-the-fly based on model outputs or your workflow.
• Please note that Gradio also provides a .render() method, which is distinct from the decorator. It allows rendering any Gradio Block within another Block.

Further Reading: Explore the Render Decorator, See Example of Dynamic Apps

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Other Python frameworks have very limited dynamic UI capabilities. Web frameworks require JavaScript for any sort of interface updates.
• Gradio allows for dynamic UI manipulation. Developers can create sophisticated and responsive interfaces using simple Python.

10. Visual Interface Development with Gradio Sketch

Gradio Sketch introduces a visual development environment that brings to you a no-code ML application design interface. It is basically a WYSIWYG editor that helps you build your interface layout with Gradio components, define events, and attach functions to these events.

• You can select and add components to your interface while getting a real-time preview of interface changes.
• You can even visually add event listeners to your components. The entire app code gets generated automatically from your visual interface designs.
• Gradio Sketch includes a code generator feature that allows you to create code for your inference functions.
• Furthermore, users can iterate over multiple prompts to get exactly the code they want.

Further Reading: Explore Gradio Sketch

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• You are required to write code to build your layout for all other Python frameworks.
• Gradio sketch reduces the learning curve for non-coders. It significantly accelerates the application development process for everyone and thus helps democratize AI.

11. Progressive Web App (PWA) Support

Gradio provides Progressive Web App capabilities. PWAs are web applications that are regular web pages or websites but can appear to the user as installable platform-specific applications.

• You can create ML applications for Mobile and Desktop without providing extra configurations.

Further Reading: Learn about PWA Support

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Most Other Python frameworks lack native PWA support. You will have to configure PWA in most of the popular web frameworks manually
• This Gradio capability makes ML applications more accessible with broader user access. You can create a mobile app instantly with an icon of your choice without additional development effort.

12. In-Browser Execution with Gradio Lite

Gradio Lite enables browser-side execution via Pyodide (WebAssembly). You can build ML demos using client-side model inference services like Transformers.js and ONNX.

• Enhanced privacy (all data stays in the user's browser)
• Zero server costs for deployment!
• Offline-capable model inference

Further Reading: Explore Gradio Lite, Learn about Transformers.js integration

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Most other Python frameworks require continuous server operation. At the same time, popular Web frameworks need separate JavaScript implementations for the backend
• There are static website platforms that don't need a server backend, but they offer very limited or basic interactivity
• Gradio enables serverless deployment of Python ML applications. With Gradio Lite, even static file hosting services (like GitHub Pages) can host complete ML applications. Gradio Lite has uniquely positioned Gradio for on-device or on-the-edge ML application delivery

13. Accelerated Development with AI-Assisted Tooling

Gradio has introduced innovative features that dramatically speed up the ML application development cycle.

• Gradio provides a hot reload capability for instant code updates in your Gradio UI during development.
• We also offer AI Playground for natural language-driven app generation.
• You can rapidly prototype an app in a single line using integrations with HuggingFace and Inference providers. This is also achievable with any API endpoint that is compatible with OpenAI. You can accomplish all this by simply using gr.load()

Further Reading: Read about recent innovations with Gradio 5, Prototyping with Huggingface

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Most other Python frameworks would require a manual refresh for code updates while developing the app. The same goes for most Web frameworks—you need complex build pipelines and development servers.
• With AI Playground Gradio offers instant UI feedback and AI-assisted development. This focus on rapid development and AI-assisted tooling enables researchers and developers to create and modify ML applications quickly.

14. Hassle-Free App Sharing

Once your Gradio app is ready, you can share it without worrying about deployment or hosting complexity.

• You can generate an instant public URL by simply setting one parameter: demo.launch(share=True). The application is accessible on a unique domain in the format xxxxx.gradio.live while keeping your code and model running in your local environment
• These share links have a 168-hour (1-week) timeout on Gradio's official share server
• You can generate an instant public URL by simply setting one parameter: demo.launch(share=True) . The application is accessible on *.gradio.live domain for 1 week.
• The share link creates a secure TLS tunnel to your locally-running app through Gradio's share server using Fast Reverse Proxy (FRP)
• For enterprise deployments or situations requiring custom domains or additional security measures, you can host your own FRP server to avoid the 1-week timeout

Further Reading: Learn about Quick Sharing, Share Links and Share Servers

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Other Python frameworks require cloud deployment and lots of configuration for sharing your apps with public. For a Web framework, you'd need manual server setup and hosting.
• Gradio offers instant sharing from your local development environment without creating any deployment pipeline, configuring a server for hosting, or any port forwarding. This gives immediate collaboration or demonstration capability to the community.
• With over 5,000 Gradio apps being shared through share links at any given time, this approach is ideal for quick prototyping and gathering immediate feedback on your machine learning app

15. Enterprise-Grade Security and Production Readiness

Gradio has evolved from a prototyping tool to a production-ready framework with comprehensive security measures. Our recent enhancements include:

• Third-party security audits from Trail of Bits and vulnerability assessments of Gradio build applications.
• Based on the feedback received from our security auditors, we have hardened file handling and upload controls. We now have configurable security settings via intuitive environment variables. For example, you can control file path access via GRADIO_ALLOWED_PATHS, and Server-side rendering through GRADIO_SSR_MODE

Further Reading: Read about Security Improvements, Explore Environment Variables

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Most Other Python frameworks often focus on development scenarios over production security. Your typical Web frameworks provide general security without ML-specific considerations.
• With Gradio you get specialized security for ML deployment scenarios, protected file upload handling for ML model inputs, and sanitized model i/o processing.
• These production-level improvements make Gradio suitable for enterprise ML deployments while maintaining its simplicity for rapid development. The Gradio framework now provides robust security defaults while offering granular control for specific deployment requirements.

16. Enhanced Dataframe Component

Gradio's updated dataframe component addresses common data visualization needs in ML applications with practical improvements:

• Multi-cell selection
• Row numbers and column pinning for navigating large datasets
• Search and filter functions for data exploration
• Static (non-editable) columns
• Improved accessibility with better keyboard navigation

Further Reading: Introducing Gradio's new Dataframe!

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Other frameworks typically require JavaScript libraries for similar functionality
• Gradio implements these features while maintaining a simple Python API
• These improvements support practical ML workflows like data exploration and interactive dashboards

17. Deep Links for Sharing App States

Gradio's Deep Links feature allows users to capture and share the exact state of an application:

• Share your unique model outputs with others
• Create snapshots of your app at specific points in time
• Implement with a single gr.DeepLinkButton component
• Works with any public Gradio app (hosted or using share=True)

Further Reading: Using Deep Links

What Sets Gradio Apart:

• Most frameworks require custom state management code to achieve similar functionality
• Deep links work across all Gradio components automatically
• Enables sharing of generated output without additional implementation effort!

Conclusion

Gradio has evolved from a demo tool into an AI-focused framework that lets developers build complete web applications in Python without requiring web development expertise.

The innovations in Gradio 4 and 5, such as Python-to-JavaScript transpilation, built-in queuing for resource-intensive models, real-time audio-video streaming with FastRTC, and server-side rendering, provide capabilities that would otherwise require extensive implementation work in other frameworks.

By handling infrastructure concerns like API endpoint generation, security vulnerabilities, and queue management, Gradio enables ML practitioners to concentrate on model development while still delivering polished user interfaces. The Gradio framework supports both rapid prototyping and production deployment scenarios through the same Python code base.

We invite you to try Gradio for your next ML project and experience firsthand why it's much more than just another UI library. Whether you're a researcher, developer, or ML enthusiast, Gradio provides tools for everyone.

Explore Gradio's capabilities!