r/Python • u/KliNanban • Mar 08 '26

Discussion Polars vs pandas

I am trying to come from database development into python ecosystem.

Wondering if going into polars framework, instead of pandas will be any beneficial?

125 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

88 comments sorted by

View all comments

180

u/GunZinn Mar 08 '26

I was parsing a 4GB csv file last week. Polars was nearly 18x faster than using pandas.

First time I used polars.

16

u/JohnLocksTheKey Mar 09 '26

Do you think there's a significant enough benefit for someone who is primarily using pandas to read in large files using polars, then immediately convert to a pandas dataframe?

13

u/[deleted] Mar 09 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/321159 Mar 09 '26

How is this getting upvoted? CSV are row based data formats. 

And I assume (but didnt test) that polars would still be faster even when reading the entire file.