List of all available matplotlib backends

Here is a modification of the script posted previously. It finds all supported backends, validates them and measures their fps. On OSX it crashes python when it comes to tkAgg, so use at your own risk ;)

from __future__ import print_function, division, absolute_import
from pylab import *
import time

import matplotlib.backends
import matplotlib.pyplot as p
import os.path


def is_backend_module(fname):
    """Identifies if a filename is a matplotlib backend module"""
    return fname.startswith('backend_') and fname.endswith('.py')

def backend_fname_formatter(fname): 
    """Removes the extension of the given filename, then takes away the leading 'backend_'."""
    return os.path.splitext(fname)[0][8:]

# get the directory where the backends live
backends_dir = os.path.dirname(matplotlib.backends.__file__)

# filter all files in that directory to identify all files which provide a backend
backend_fnames = filter(is_backend_module, os.listdir(backends_dir))

backends = [backend_fname_formatter(fname) for fname in backend_fnames]

print("supported backends: \t" + str(backends))

# validate backends
backends_valid = []
for b in backends:
    try:
        p.switch_backend(b)
        backends_valid += [b]
    except:
        continue

print("valid backends: \t" + str(backends_valid))


# try backends performance
for b in backends_valid:

    ion()
    try:
        p.switch_backend(b)


        clf()
        tstart = time.time()               # for profiling
        x = arange(0,2*pi,0.01)            # x-array
        line, = plot(x,sin(x))
        for i in arange(1,200):
            line.set_ydata(sin(x+i/10.0))  # update the data
            draw()                         # redraw the canvas

        print(b + ' FPS: \t' , 200/(time.time()-tstart))
        ioff()

    except:
        print(b + " error :(")

To just see supported interactive backends see:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from __future__ import print_function
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib

backends = matplotlib.rcsetup.interactive_bk
# validate backends
backends_valid = []
for b in backends:
    try:
        plt.switch_backend(b)
        backends_valid += [b]
    except:
        continue
print(backends_valid)

You can pretend to put a wrong backend argument, then it will return you a ValueError with the list of valid matplotlib backends, like this:

Input:

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('WRONG_ARG')

Output:

ValueError: Unrecognized backend string 'test': valid strings are ['GTK3Agg', 'GTK3Cairo', 'MacOSX', 'nbAgg', 'Qt4Agg', 'Qt4Cairo', 'Qt5Agg', 'Qt
5Cairo', 'TkAgg', 'TkCairo', 'WebAgg', 'WX', 'WXAgg', 'WXCairo', 'agg', 'cairo', 'pdf', 'pgf', 'ps', 'svg', 'template']

There is the hard-coded list mentioned by Sven, but to find every backend which Matplotlib can use (based on the current implementation for setting up a backend) the matplotlib/backends folder can be inspected.

The following code does this:

import matplotlib.backends
import os.path

def is_backend_module(fname):
    """Identifies if a filename is a matplotlib backend module"""
    return fname.startswith('backend_') and fname.endswith('.py')

def backend_fname_formatter(fname): 
    """Removes the extension of the given filename, then takes away the leading 'backend_'."""
    return os.path.splitext(fname)[0][8:]

# get the directory where the backends live
backends_dir = os.path.dirname(matplotlib.backends.__file__)

# filter all files in that directory to identify all files which provide a backend
backend_fnames = filter(is_backend_module, os.listdir(backends_dir))

backends = [backend_fname_formatter(fname) for fname in backend_fnames]

print backends

You can also see some documentation for a few backends here:

http://matplotlib.org/api/index_backend_api.html

the pages lists just a few backends, some of them don't have a proper documentation:

matplotlib.backend_bases
matplotlib.backends.backend_gtkagg
matplotlib.backends.backend_qt4agg
matplotlib.backends.backend_wxagg
matplotlib.backends.backend_pdf
matplotlib.dviread
matplotlib.type1font

What about this?

%matplotlib --list
Available matplotlib backends: ['tk', 'gtk', 'gtk3', 'wx', 'qt4', 'qt5', 'qt', 'osx', 'nbagg', 'notebook', 'agg', 'svg', 'pdf', 'ps', 'inline', 'ipympl', 'widget']

You could look at the following folder for a list of possible backends...

/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/matplotlib/backends
/usr/lib64/Python2.6/site-packages/matplotlib/backends