Comparing Apache NPOI and IronXL in C#: A Complete Guide

NPOI is the most-downloaded free Excel library for .NET. The NuGet package has over 100 million downloads, it appears in countless Stack Overflow answers, and it powers Excel generation in thousands of production applications. It is also, by a wide margin, the least-documented popular library in the .NET ecosystem. The official documentation is a GitHub README with a few code snippets. There is no API reference site, no getting-started guide, no tutorial series.

// NPOI: Create a workbook and write one cellusing NPOI.XSSF.UserModel;using System.IO;var workbook = new XSSFWorkbook();var sheet = workbook.CreateSheet("Sheet1");var row = sheet.CreateRow(0);var cell = row.CreateCell(0);cell.SetCellValue("Hello, Excel");using var stream = new FileStream("hello.xlsx", FileMode.Create);workbook.Write(stream);

NPOI Output

NPOI output

// IronXL: Same resultvar wb = IronXL.WorkBook.Create();wb.DefaultWorkSheet["A1"].Value = "Hello, Excel";wb.SaveAs("hello.xlsx");

IronXL Output

Example IronXL output

Full disclosure: we are the engineering team behind IronXL, one of the libraries compared in this article. We use IronXL as the primary comparison because we...

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