Protocol Buffers
Serialization format and code generator for structured data.
Forms, validation and schemas PyPI 3-Clause BSD License
Used in agent projects
75
0.6% of 12,697 public repos built with AI coding agents
Rank in forms, validation and schemas
#7 of 22
by use in those projects
Downloads
154M
PyPI, last 7 days, protobuf
GitHub stars
—
no public repo found
How Protocol Buffers is used
Protocol Buffers is a dependency in 75 of the 12,697 public GitHub projects set up for AI coding agents that we scanned (0.6%), #7 of 22 in forms, validation and schemas. The most used alternative there is Zod. Projects that use it most often also use Requests (90.7%), charset-normalizer (74.7%), urllib3 (74.7%).
Often used with Protocol Buffers
| Requests | 90.7% of Protocol Buffers projects · 17.1× more than average |
|---|---|
| charset-normalizer | 74.7% of Protocol Buffers projects · 60.0× more than average |
| urllib3 | 74.7% of Protocol Buffers projects · 49.1× more than average |
| websockets | 72.0% of Protocol Buffers projects · 32.0× more than average |
| Click | 69.3% of Protocol Buffers projects · 39.5× more than average |
| PyYAML | 65.3% of Protocol Buffers projects · 21.5× more than average |
| attrs | 65.3% of Protocol Buffers projects · 64.8× more than average |
By coding agent
| Claude Code | 0.8% of projects set up for it |
|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | 0.9% of projects set up for it |
| Cursor | 0.8% of projects set up for it |
Share of public repos configured for each agent that list Protocol Buffers as a dependency.
Install
| Package | pip install protobuf |
|---|---|
| Main stacks | Python (71), Next.js (3), Other (1) |
| Example projects | Kaggle/kaggle-environments, kr8tiv-ai/Jarvis, siiway/NextBridge, mimfort/rag_for_git, touyi/solana-onchain-arbitrage-bot-contract |
Alternatives to Protocol Buffers
| Tool | Used in agent projects | Downloads / wk | GitHub stars | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zod npm TypeScript-first schema validation library with static type inference. |
2,153 (17.0%) | 326M | 44.1K | MIT |
| React Hook Form npm Performant form state library using React Hooks with minimal rerenders. |
1,021 (8.0%) | 54.7M | 44.9K | MIT |
| React Hook Form Resolvers npm Validation resolvers for React Hook Form supporting Zod, Yup, and others. |
885 (7.0%) | 45.1M | 2,264 | MIT |
| Pydantic pypi Data validation and parsing library using Python type hints. |
649 (5.1%) | 222M | 29K | — |
| Ajv npm Fast JSON Schema validator for runtime schema validation and serialization. |
131 (1.0%) | 391M | 14.9K | MIT |
| jsonschema pypi Python implementation of JSON Schema validation for structured data. |
129 (1.0%) | 125M | 4,989 | — |
| drizzle-zod npm Generate Zod validation schemas automatically from Drizzle ORM database schemas. |
68 (0.5%) | 3.2M | 36K | Apache-2.0 |
| ajv-formats npm Format validation plugin for Ajv JSON schema validator (email, UUID, date, etc). |
56 (0.4%) | 141M | 228 | MIT |