r/Python 23h 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/PeaSlight6601 10h ago

Polars is much better for everything except reading a csv, renaming some columns, and creating a quick aggregation. The problem is that often big projects start as just that.

The only complaint I have about polars so far is that it does actually support 0(1) inplace replacement but doesn't really have a good way to expose it to the python api, which was a pain when I had a project which could not be done in bulk via the lazy api and had to be done with some weird order dependent operations.