Pandas vs Polars in 2025: Who Wins the Data Speed Race?

[Lomanu4]

Pandas is mature, flexible, battle-tested.
? Polars is fast, lean, and written in Rust.

Tested on 10-core CPU, here’s what I found:
? Benchmarks (avg. of 3 runs)

• Group by date (76M rows):
• Pandas 28s | Polars 4.7s
• Log filtering (10GB gz):
• Pandas 95s ? | Polars 18s ?
• Multi-key group:
• Pandas 6.3s | Polars 0.9s
• Sorting (10M rows):
• Pandas 14s | Polars 3.8s
• Rolling mean:
• Pandas 1.1s | Polars 0.22s

Why Polars flies
True multi-threading
Lazy evaluation
Arrow memory layout
No GIL bottleneck

So, which to pick?
? Pandas for quick experiments & ecosystem glue
? Polars for production speed & large datasets

? Learn both. Use what fits. Don’t force pandas to do a polar bear’s job.

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