---
id: narwhals
version: "2.24.0"
license: MIT
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# narwhals — Extremely lightweight compatibility layer between dataframe libraries

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Popularity: top 1,000 on PyPI

## Install

pip install narwhals
uv add narwhals
poetry add narwhals

## Description

# Narwhals

<h1 align="center">
	<img
		width="400"
		alt="narwhals_small"
		src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/968545af-ea0f-48bb-8377-144e93f7abf8">
</h1>

[![PyPI version](https://badge.fury.io/py/narwhals.svg)](https://badge.fury.io/py/narwhals)
[![Downloads](https://static.pepy.tech/badge/narwhals/month)](https://pepy.tech/project/narwhals)
[![Trusted publishing](https://img.shields.io/badge/Trusted_publishing-Provides_attestations-bright_green)](https://peps.python.org/pep-0740/)
[![PYPI - Types](https://img.shields.io/pypi/types/narwhals)](https://pypi.org/project/narwhals)
[![LFX Health Score](https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/api/badge/health-score?project=narwhals-dev-narwhals)](https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/narwhals-dev-narwhals)
[![OpenSSF Scorecard](https://api.securityscorecards.dev/projects/github.com/narwhals-dev/narwhals/badge)](https://securityscorecards.dev/viewer/?uri=github.com/narwhals-dev/narwhals)

Extremely lightweight and extensible compatibility layer between dataframe libraries!

- **Full API support**: cuDF, Modin, pandas, Polars, PyArrow.
- **Lazy-only support**: Daft, Dask, DuckDB, Ibis, PySpark,...

## AI interpretation — verify before relying

Narwhals is a zero-dependency compatibility layer that lets you write dataframe code once and run it against pandas, Polars, DuckDB, Dask, PySpark, cuDF, Modin, PyArrow, and other libraries without importing them.

Verdict: Narwhals is a production-ready (Development Status 5), actively maintained library with no security vulnerabilities, zero dependencies, and full type hints. It solves a genuine pain point for library maintainers needing dataframe agnosticism without bloating their dependency tree. The top-1000 popularity tier and adoption by major projects (altair, bokeh, lightgbm, pandera) validate its utility.

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/narwhals) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/narwhals/)