How to Uninstall a Blender Add-on

Removing a Blender add-on is a two-line answer for the easy case and a genuinely fiddly one for the case people actually search for: the add-on that errors on every startup, or that you removed and whose panel is somehow still there.

Here is the easy case, then everything else. If what you actually want is a newer version rather than a clean removal, updating add-ons is the page you want — they are different operations.

The 30-second answer

Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Add-ons (or Get Extensions).
Search for the add-on.
Expand it and click Remove — or use the ▾ dropdown on its entry.
Confirm. Restart Blender.

Removal is permanent and Blender says so. That is the whole procedure when nothing has gone wrong.

Disable first, remove second

Before you remove anything, consider whether you actually want it gone.

Disabling — unticking the checkbox — unregisters the add-on's operators, panels, and keymaps. Its startup cost goes away, its UI clutter goes away, and its preferences survive. Re-enabling restores your configuration exactly.

Removing deletes the files. Whatever you had configured inside that add-on is gone.

If your goal is "Blender starts faster", disabling is the correct tool, it is reversible, and there is a whole guide to doing it systematically. Same for "my N-panel is a mess". Removal is for add-ons you are genuinely done with, or ones that are broken.

Also worth knowing: a disabled add-on still occupies disk space and still appears in the list. If the list itself is the problem, see managing extensions.

Removing an extension vs. a legacy add-on

Both use the same Remove control, but they live in different places and clean up differently.

Extensions (installed in Blender 4.2 LTS or newer from the Extensions platform or from disk) are self-contained folders inside your user extensions/ directory. Removing one deletes its folder. Clean.

Legacy add-ons (a bare .py, or an old-style .zip with a bl_info block) live in scripts/addons/. Removal deletes the module — but anything the add-on wrote outside its own folder stays. That includes cached data, config files it created next to the blend file, and its entry in your user preferences.

That last item is the one that produces "I removed it and it is still there."

What Blender leaves behind

Three things survive an ordinary Remove:

1. Add-on preferences. These live inside userpref.blend, not in the add-on folder. Once the add-on is gone the orphaned block is harmless and ignored, but it is why reinstalling an add-on sometimes restores settings you thought you had wiped.

2. Files the add-on created elsewhere. Asset libraries, baked texture caches, downloaded HDRIs, license files. An add-on that manages a material library has written megabytes somewhere you chose during setup. Blender does not track those and will not delete them.

3. Registered file paths. If the add-on asked you to add an asset library or a script directory, that path stays registered in Preferences ▸ File Paths and now points at nothing. Worth clearing manually.

Removing an add-on by hand

Use this when the in-app Remove button is not an option — most often because the add-on crashes Blender on startup, so you can never reach Preferences in the first place.

Close Blender first. Then open your user directory, substituting your Blender version for 5.2:

Windows — %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\5.2\
macOS — ~/Library/Application Support/Blender/5.2/
Linux — ~/.config/blender/5.2/

Paste the path into your file browser's address bar; on Windows the AppData folder is hidden by default.

Inside, you want one of two subfolders:

extensions/ — one folder per repository, then one folder per extension. Delete the extension's folder.
scripts/addons/ — legacy add-ons. Delete the add-on's folder or its .py file.

Start Blender. The add-on is gone, and so is whatever it was doing at startup.

Running a portable install? Your configuration is next to the Blender executable in a folder named portable, not in the paths above. Same subfolder layout inside it.

When Blender will not start at all

An add-on that raises during registration can take Blender down with it. The order to try:

1. Start with no add-ons. Launch Blender from a terminal with --factory-startup. This loads factory defaults and skips your add-ons entirely, which confirms an add-on is the cause and gets you a working Blender to work from. It does not modify your preferences — closing without saving them changes nothing.

2. Delete the offending folder. Use the manual removal steps above. If you do not know which add-on it is, the console output names the module in its traceback: Window ▸ Toggle System Console on Windows, or read the terminal output on macOS and Linux.

3. Last resort — reset preferences. Rename config/userpref.blend inside your user directory to userpref.blend.bak. Blender regenerates a default one on next launch. You lose every preference and every add-on's settings, but you get a working Blender, and the .bak is there if you want to inspect it later.

Removing every add-on at once

For a genuinely clean slate — a new machine, a rendering box, a bug report where you need to prove the problem is not your add-ons:

Delete the whole extensions/ and scripts/addons/ folders from your user directory. Blender recreates them empty on next launch.

Back the folders up first if you might want them back. Copying them out is also the easiest way to move an entire add-on setup to another machine.

Reinstalling cleanly after a bad update

The reliable sequence, when a manual update has left an add-on in a strange state:

Remove the add-on from Preferences.
Restart Blender. This matters — Python does not truly unload a module until the process ends, so a same-session reinstall can reuse stale code and reproduce the exact bug you were trying to fix.
Install the new .zip.
Enable it and check its preferences, which may have reset.

Skipping step 2 is the reason "I reinstalled it and it is still broken" is such a common report.

For add-on developers

Everything above describes a user's side of a problem that starts on yours: users on old versions who have no idea a fix shipped, and who then uninstall-reinstall by hand and get it wrong.

If your add-on can tell them a newer version exists — inside Blender, on the day you release it — most of this page becomes irrelevant to them. Project LEUC is a free update-check endpoint for exactly that: you publish a version to the registry, your add-on asks whether it is current, the user sees a notice. It does not host your files and does not care where you sell them.