Ecosystem

Used by

The following is a non-exhaustive list of libraries and tools that choose to use Narwhals for their dataframe interoperability needs:

• altair
• bokeh
• darts
• hierarchicalforecast
• marimo
• metalearners
• panel-graphic-walker
• plotly
• pointblank
• pymarginaleffects
• py-shiny
• rio
• scikit-lego
• scikit-playtime
• tabmat
• tea-tasting
• timebasedcv
• tubular
• Validoopsie
• vegafusion
• wimsey

If your project is missing from the list, feel free to open a PR to add it.

If you would like to chat with us, or if you need any support, please join our Discord server.

Related projects

Array API

Array counterpart to the DataFrame API, see here.

PyCapsule Interface

Allows C extension modules to safely share pointers to C data structures with Python code and other C modules, encapsulating the pointer with a name and optional destructor to manage resources and ensure safe access, see here for details.

Narwhals supports exporting a DataFrame via the Arrow PyCapsule Interface. See Universal dataframe support with the Arrow PyCapsule Interface + Narwhals for how you can use them together.

Ibis

Pitched as "The portable Dataframe library", Ibis provides a Pythonic frontend to various SQL (as well as Polars LazyFrame) engines. Some differences with Narwhals are:

• Narwhals allows you to write "Dataframe X in, Dataframe X out" functions. Ibis allows materialising to pandas, Polars (eager), and PyArrow, but has no way to get back to the input type exactly (e.g. Enums don't round-trip in Ibis)
• Narwhals respects input data types as much as possible, Ibis doesn't support Categorical / Enum.
• Narwhals separates between lazy and eager APIs, with the eager API providing very fine control over dataframe operations (slicing rows and columns, iterating over rows, getting values out of the dataframe as Python scalars). Ibis is more focused on lazy execution.
• Narwhals is extremely lightweight and comes with zero required dependencies, Ibis requires pandas and PyArrow for all backends.
• Narwhals uses a subset of the Polars API, Ibis uses its own pandas/dplyr-inspired API.
• Ibis currently supports more backends than Narwhals
• Narwhals supports pandas and Dask, which Ibis has deprecated support for.

Although people often ask about the two tools, we consider them to be very different and not in competition. In particular, Narwhals supports ibis Tables, meaning that dataframe-agnostic code written using Narwhals' lazy API also supports Ibis.