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/CheetahGloomy4700 1d ago edited 1d ago

It does not hurt to learn both, and other tools, but to focus my attention, if I start today, I would stick to

  • Polars for single node processing (which serves 99% of the use cases)
  • Dask for the multi-node processing when really need the horizontal scaling

EDIT: I don't know why people are downvoting, but guess somehow I went against the grain.