pygad provides a framework for dealing with Gadget snapshots. The code reads any of the many different Gadget (ascl:0003.001) formats, allows easy masking snapshots to particles of interest, decorates the data blocks with units, allows to add automatically updating derived blocks, and provides several binning and plotting routines, among other tasks, to provide convenient, intuitive handling of the Gadget data without the need to worry about technical details. pygad provides access to single stellar population (SSP) models, has an interface to Rockstar (ascl:1210.008) output files, provides its own friends-of-friends (FoF) finder, calculates spherical overdensities, and has a sub-module to generate mock absorption lines.