You can use assert_frame_equals with check_names=False (so as not to check the index/columns names), which will raise if they are not equal:
In [11]: from pandas.testing import assert_frame_equal
In [12]: assert_frame_equal(df, expected, check_names=False)
You can wrap this in a function with something like:
try:
assert_frame_equal(df, expected, check_names=False)
return True
except AssertionError:
return False
In more recent pandas this functionality has been added as .equals
:
df.equals(expected)