polars VS Apache Arrow

Compare polars vs Apache Arrow and see what are their differences.

polars

Dataframes powered by a multithreaded, vectorized query engine, written in Rust (by ritchie46)

Apache Arrow

Apache Arrow is the universal columnar format and multi-language toolbox for fast data interchange and in-memory analytics (by apache)
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polars Apache Arrow
149 84
31,773 14,959
2.0% 1.2%
10.0 9.9
6 days ago 6 days ago
Rust C++
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

polars

Posts with mentions or reviews of polars. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-10-30.

Apache Arrow

Posts with mentions or reviews of Apache Arrow. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-01-29.
  • Adding concurrent read/write to DuckDB with Arrow Flight
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jan 2025
    @1egg0myegg0 that's great to hear. I'll check to see if it applies to Arrow.

    Another performance issue with DuckDB/Arrow integration that we've been working to solve is that Arrow lacked a canonical way to pass statistics along with a stream of data. So for example if you're reading Parquet files and passing them to DuckDB, you would lose the ability to pass the Parquet column statistics to DuckDB for things like join order optimization. We recently added an API to Arrow to enable passing statistics, and the DuckDB devs are working to implement this. Discussion at https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/38837.

  • Unlocking DuckDB from Anywhere - A Guide to Remote Access with Apache Arrow and Flight RPC (gRPC)
    4 projects | dev.to | 12 Dec 2024
    Apache Arrow : It contains a set of technologies that enable big data systems to process and move data fast
  • Using Polars in Rust for high-performance data analysis
    9 projects | dev.to | 30 Oct 2024
    One of the main selling points of Polars over similar solutions such as Pandas is performance. Polars is written in highly optimized Rust and uses the Apache Arrow container format.
  • Kotlin DataFrame ❤️ Arrow
    3 projects | dev.to | 10 Oct 2024
    Kotlin DataFrame v0.14 comes with improvements for reading Apache Arrow format, especially loading a DataFrame from any ArrowReader. This improvement can be used to easily load results from analytical databases (such as DuckDB, ClickHouse) directly into Kotlin DataFrame.
  • Random access string compression with FSST and Rust
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Sep 2024
  • Declarative Multi-Engine Data Stack with Ibis
    6 projects | dev.to | 17 Jul 2024
    Apache Arrow
  • Shades of Open Source - Understanding The Many Meanings of "Open"
    9 projects | dev.to | 15 Jun 2024
    It's this kind of certainty that underscores the vital role of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Many first encounter Apache through its pioneering project, the open-source web server framework that remains ubiquitous in web operations today. The ASF was initially created to hold the intellectual property and assets of the Apache project, and it has since evolved into a cornerstone for open-source projects worldwide. The ASF enforces strict standards for diverse contributions, independence, and activity in its projects, ensuring they can withstand the test of time as standards in software development. Many open-source projects strive to become Apache projects to gain the community credibility necessary for adoption as standard software building blocks, such as Apache Tomcat for Java web applications, Apache Arrow for in-memory data representation, and Apache Parquet for data file formatting, among others.
  • The Simdjson Library
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jun 2024
  • Arrow Flight SQL in Apache Doris for 10X faster data transfer
    2 projects | dev.to | 12 May 2024
    Apache Doris 2.1 has a data transmission channel built on Arrow Flight SQL. (Apache Arrow is a software development platform designed for high data movement efficiency across systems and languages, and the Arrow format aims for high-performance, lossless data exchange.) It allows high-speed, large-scale data reading from Doris via SQL in various mainstream programming languages. For target clients that also support the Arrow format, the whole process will be free of serialization/deserialization, thus no performance loss. Another upside is, Arrow Flight can make full use of multi-node and multi-core architecture and implement parallel data transfer, which is another enabler of high data throughput.
  • How moving from Pandas to Polars made me write better code without writing better code
    2 projects | dev.to | 5 Mar 2024
    In comes Polars: a brand new dataframe library, or how the author Ritchie Vink describes it... a query engine with a dataframe frontend. Polars is built on top of the Arrow memory format and is written in Rust, which is a modern performant and memory-safe systems programming language similar to C/C++.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing polars and Apache Arrow you can also consider the following projects:

datatable - A Python package for manipulating 2-dimensional tabular data structures

FlatBuffers - FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library

DataFrames.jl - In-memory tabular data in Julia

Apache Spark - Apache Spark - A unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing

modin - Modin: Scale your Pandas workflows by changing a single line of code

Airflow - Apache Airflow - A platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows

vaex - Out-of-Core hybrid Apache Arrow/NumPy DataFrame for Python, ML, visualization and exploration of big tabular data at a billion rows per second 🚀

h5py - HDF5 for Python -- The h5py package is a Pythonic interface to the HDF5 binary data format.

datafusion - Apache DataFusion SQL Query Engine

Redis - Redis is an in-memory database that persists on disk. The data model is key-value, but many different kind of values are supported: Strings, Lists, Sets, Sorted Sets, Hashes, Streams, HyperLogLogs, Bitmaps.

PyO3 - Rust bindings for the Python interpreter

ClickHouse - ClickHouse® is a real-time analytics database management system

Nutrient - The #1 PDF SDK Library
Bad PDFs = bad UX. Slow load times, broken annotations, clunky UX frustrates users. Nutrient’s PDF SDKs gives seamless document experiences, fast rendering, annotations, real-time collaboration, 100+ features. Used by 10K+ devs, serving ~half a billion users worldwide. Explore the SDK for free.
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