Plotly · Function

pio.show

Displays a Plotly figure using the renderer framework. You can use the configured default renderer or select an available renderer for a particular display call.

How it works

pio.show accepts a Plotly figure or figure-like dictionary and renders it through Plotly's renderer framework. The optional renderer argument can select a specific renderer for that display call; otherwise the configured default renderer is used.

Syntax

plotly.io.show(fig, *args, **kwargs)

Parameters

Name	Type	Description
`fig`	`object`	Figure or figure-like dictionary to display.
`renderer`	`str or None`	Optional name of an available renderer to use for this display.

Returns

Displays the figure; no documented return value was provided in the available official documentation.

Key points

Call pio.show with a Plotly figure to render it.
Set pio.renderers.default when subsequent displays should use a different default.
The function belongs to Plotly's Python display workflow for graphical figures.

Common mistakes

A renderer argument affects only that display call and does not change the global default.

Example: Display a figure with a selected renderer

import plotly.express as px
import plotly.io as pio

fig = px.bar(x=["A", "B", "C"], y=[2, 5, 3])
pio.show(fig, renderer="browser")

Creates a bar figure and displays it with Plotly's browser renderer.

When to use it

Render a chart interactively

Notebook or interactive Python session

Open a figure with the browser renderer

Browser-based viewing

Choose a renderer suited to the execution environment

Custom output environments

Interview questions

QWhat does pio.show do?

It displays a Plotly figure or figure-like object using the renderer framework. The renderer determines how and where the chart is presented.

Follow-up: How would you change rendering for one call without changing configuration? Pass an available renderer name through the renderer keyword argument.

QHow do you control which renderer pio.show uses?

Pass the figure as the first argument and optionally provide renderer to choose an available renderer. Without renderer, Plotly uses its configured default renderer or renderers.

Follow-up: How can the default be changed for later displays? Assign an available renderer name to pio.renderers.default.

QHow does pio.show relate to Figure.show()?

A graph-object figure can be displayed with either fig.show() or plotly.io.show(fig). Both use the current default renderer configuration.

Follow-up: When is pio.show useful with low-level data? It can display figures represented as dictionaries, including figure-like dictionaries.

plotly.io.renderers
plotly.graph_objects.Figure.show
plotly.io.write_html
plotly.io.to_html

Source: Displaying figures in Python. Checked 2026-10-15.