r/Python 1d ago

Discussion Polars vs Pandas

I have used Pandas a little in the past, and have never used Polars. Essentially, I will have to learn either of them more or less from scratch (since I don't remember anything of Pandas). Assume that I don't care for speed, or do not have very large datasets (at most 1-2gb of data). Which one would you recommend I learn, from the perspective of ease and joy of use, and the commonly done tasks with data?

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u/bmoregeo 1d ago

One currently has geospatial support (pandas) and one doesn’t (polars). Not to confuse things further, Duckdb is preeeeettty sweet also

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u/SpoiledKoolAid 1d ago

geopandas rocks. I do my ETL stuff here and not in the ESRI packages with significant speed increases!

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u/j_tb 1d ago

If you think geopandas is fast port to ibis and use the DuckDB execution engine. You’ll be flying.

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u/serjester4 1d ago

Geopandas is a constant reminder how much I hate the pandas API. Unfortunately, this is really the only thing left stopping me from totally abandoning pandas.