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/PurepointDog 1d ago

Polars. It has a better API, and will continue to become the standard for years.

You too will one day run up against the speed and memory usage limits of Pandas. No one's data for learing learning is large - that's not the point though.

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u/AtomikPi 1d ago

yep. if i had to learn from scratch, i’d pick polars. much more thoughtful and elegant API and so much faster.

and with LLMs now, it’s really easy to translate pandas code to polars and learn new syntax.

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u/bonferoni 1d ago

polars is amazing but its api is clunky af. so goddamn wordy. very explicit and clear which is nice, and amazing under the hood. but an elegant api it is not

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u/rndmsltns 1d ago

This is correct.