Introduction to Qt

Qt is a modern, cross-platform framework for building applications with responsive, high-performance user interfaces. Whether you are developing desktop software, mobile apps, or embedded systems, Qt provides the tools, APIs, and design workflows you need to create polished, reliable products.

Qt supports a wide range of platforms and hardware, gives you a consistent set of APIs, and includes professional tooling for both developers and designers. With Qt, you write your application once and deploy it across your target platforms with minimal adaptation.

Designing user interfaces

Qt's recommended and most capable UI technology is Qt Quick, which uses QML, a declarative language designed specifically for building fluid, animated, and device-friendly interfaces.

Qt Quick is ideal for:

• Highly animated and modern UX patterns.
• Touch-based interactions.
• Mobile and embedded devices.
• Visually rich, GPU-accelerated UI components.
• Rapid iteration and designer-developer collaboration.

Qt also includes Qt Widgets, a mature C++-based UI toolkit mainly intended for maintaining existing desktop applications. New UI development should start with Qt Quick.

For more information, see User Interfaces.

Cross-platform development

Qt is built for cross-platform development. A large set of Qt modules is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and a broad range of embedded Linux boards and SoCs.

Qt abstracts away platform differences so your application logic and UI can remain largely the same across targets.

Qt uses CMake as the primary build system. CMake integrates cleanly with Qt Creator, Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, and various continuous integration systems.

For more information, see Supported Platforms.

Features and APIs

Qt features a large set of modules that cover most application needs, including:

• User interfaces and controls.
• Networking and communication protocols.
• Graphics and rendering.
• Web technologies.
• JSON, XML, and binary data handling.
• Localization and accessibility.
• Sensors and hardware integration.
• 2D and 3D visualization.

Essentials form the core of the framework and are available across all supported development platforms and all tested target platforms.

Add-ons extend Qt with specialized capabilities such as 3D rendering, data visualization, connectivity, multimedia, and more.

For more information, see All Modules.

Tools

Qt includes a set of development tools that support the entire workflow from design to deployment:

• Qt Creator is a full-featured IDE for coding, debugging, building, testing, packaging, and deploying Qt applications.
• Qt Design Studio is a visual design tool for creating 2D and 3D Qt Quick interfaces. Designers can build layouts, animations, and component libraries using a visual workflow and export production-ready QML.

Additional tools are available for low-level debugging, localization, embedded device deployment, UI profiling, performance analysis, and much more. See Tools.

Other development environments

If you prefer other development environments, Qt offers these IDE extensions:

• Qt extensions for Visual Studio Code for QML editing, project setup, code navigation, and build workflows.
• Qt extensions for Visual Studio for Windows C++ developers building Qt applications.

Programming languages

Qt supports multiple development workflows:

• C++ is the primary language for building Qt applications and extending Qt Quick with high-performance logic.
• QML is used to create Qt Quick user interfaces.
• Qt for Python enables Python developers to use Qt APIs and QML to create applications rapidly.

Where to go next

• Getting Started
• Examples and Tutorials
• Supported Platforms