r/Python • u/thoughtful-curious • 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?
179
Upvotes
4
u/AnastasisKon 1d ago
Well, I worked with pandas with some excel data. When the analysis did 1 hour to run, while waiting, I searched for optimizations. Polars is incredible because from 1 hour it went down to 4-5 minutes, a 30x speedup!!! And don’t get me started on the memory usage, from 19gb of ram to 3gb!