# Parquet vs Acta
Parquet is the natural comparison for Acta's typed, compressed columnar blocks.
## Parquet advantages
- Mature readers, writers, schemas, encodings, and query-engine integrations.
- Excellent compression and column pruning for sealed analytical datasets.
- Row-group statistics support efficient predicate pushdown.
## Acta advantages
- Designed around continuously appending blocks to one file.
- Readers can include newly completed blocks without rebuilding a dataset manifest.
- Concurrent producers can prepare and compress independent blocks before a short append step.
## Trade-off
Parquet is preferable for interoperable, immutable analytical datasets. Acta targets live time-series capture where append behavior is part of the format rather than a convention built around multiple files.