# Feather file format

10 Hacker News commenters recommended Feather file format and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Fast columnar file format for dataframes, zero-copy and simpler than Arrow IPC for many uses. Caveat: inefficient for single-row appends and offers little compression.

## Why people recommend it

- Fast access and good performance (2 comments): "Parquet and Feather can have excellent performance and space efficiency if you use them for their intended purposes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214235)) "Access is much faster from Feather but Feather is really good" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45989355))

## What people warn about

- Inefficient at batch size of one (1 comments): "Feather would work but is quite inefficient with a batch size of 1." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292045))
- High per-append overhead (1 comments): "The main problem is that the per-append overhead is kind of silly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46997247))
- Little compression; Arrow makes it redundant (1 comments): "Arrow makes Feather redundant. Very little in the way of compression (if any)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45989803))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Apache Arrow](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apache-arrow.md): 20 recommend
- [Vortex file format](https://hackerapproved.com/p/vortex.md): 13 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Feather file format", https://hackerapproved.com/p/feather/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).