Likelihood to Recommend In my humble opinion, if you are working on something related to Statistics, RStudio is your go-to tool. But if you are looking for something in Machine Learning, look out for Python. The beauty is that there are packages now by which you can write Python/SQL in R. Cross-platform functionality like such makes RStudio way ahead of its competition. A couple of chinks in RStudio armor are very small and can be considered as nagging just for the sake of argument. Other than completely based on programming language, I couldn't find significant drawbacks to using RStudio. It is one of the best free software available in the market at present.
Read full review SAS Advance Analytics is well suited for data that is visual. Data where you want to see multiple graphs and models are good for this software. However, if your data is more descriptive this may not be the best program. SAS is well suited for data where you need to make comparisons on the feasibility of two different programs. Data that can be compared is perfect for this software.
Read full review Pros The support is incredibly professional and helpful, and they often go out of their way to help me when something doesn't work. The one-click publishing from RStudio Connect is absolutely amazing, and I really like the way that it deploys your exact package versions, because otherwise, you can get in a terrible mess. Python doesn't feel quite as native as R at the moment but I have definitely deployed stuff in R and Python that works beautifully which is really nice indeed. Read full review SAS is can be used as query builder tool which can automate a lot of excel process. There are variety of statistical options available that tie up good visual analytics. There are inbuilt models available for different operations which doesn't require any coding and are easy to run. Read full review Cons Python integration is newer and still can be rough, especially with when using virtual environments. RStudio Connect pricing feels very department focused, not quite an enterprise perspective. Some of the RStudio packages don't follow conventional development guidelines (API breaking changes with minor version numbers) which can make supporting larger projects over longer timeframes difficult. Read full review SAS Analytics does not have very good graphic capabilities. Their advanced graphics packages are expensive, and still not very appealing or intuitive to customize. SAS Analytics is not as up-to-date when it comes to advanced analytical techniques as R or other open-source analytics packages. Read full review Likelihood to Renew There is no viable alternative right now. The toolset is good and the functionality is increasing with every release. It is backed by regular releases and ongoing development by the RStudio team. There is good engagement with RStudio directly when support is required. Also there's a strong and growing community of developers who provide additional support and sample code.
Read full review Not only does SAS become easier to use as the user gets more familiar with its capabilities, but the customer service is excellent. Any issues with SAS and their technical team is either contacting the user via email, chat, text, WebEx, or phone. They have power users that have years of experience with SAS there to help with any issue.
Read full review Usability I think it's a quick and easy to use tool. The IDE is very intuitive and easy to adapt to. You do not need to learn a lot of things to use this tool. Any programmer and a person with knowledge or R can quick use this tool without issues.
Read full review If SAS Enterprise Guide is utilized any beginning user will be able to shorten the learning curve. This is allow the user a plethora of basic capabilities until they can utilize coding to expand their needs in manipulating and presenting data. SAS is also dedicated to expanding this environment so it is ever growing.
Read full review Reliability and Availability RStudio is very available and cheap to use. It needs to be updated every once in a while, but the updates tend to be quick and they do not hinder my ability to make progress. I have not experienced any RStudio outages, and I have used the application quite a bit for a variety of statistical analyses
Read full review SAS probably has the most market saturation out of all of the analytics software worldwide. They are in every industry and they are knowledgable about every industry. They are always available to take questions, solve issues, and discuss a company's needs. A company that buys SAS software has a dedicated representative that is there for all of their needs.
Read full review Performance Although nothing is perfect, SAS is almost there. The software can handle billions of rows of data without a glitch and runs at a quick pace regardless of what the user wants to perform. SAS products are made to handle data so performance is of their utmost important. The software is created to run things as efficiently as SAS software can to maximize performance.
Read full review Support Rating Since R is trendy among statisticians, you can find lots of help from the data science/ stats communities. If you need help with anything related to RStudio or R, google it or search on StackOverflow, you might easily find the solution that you are looking for.
Read full review SAS is generally known for good support that's one of the main reasons to justify the cost of having SAS licenses within our organization is knowing that customer support is just a quick phone call away. I've usually had good experiences with the SAS customer support team it's one of the ways in which the company stands out in my view.
Read full review In-Person Training SAS has regional and national conferences that are dedicated to expanding users' knowledge of the software and showing them what changes and additions they are making to the software. There are user groups in most of the major cities that also provide multi-day seminars that focus on specific topics for education. If online training isn't the best way for the user, there is ample in-person training available.
Read full review Online Training There are online videos, live classes, and resource material which makes training very easy to access. However, nothing is circumstantial so applying your training can get tricky if the user is performing complex tasks. When purchasing software, SAS will also allocate education credits so the user(s) can access classes and material online to help expand their knowledge.
Read full review Implementation Rating We did it at the individual level: anyone willing to code in R can use it. No real deployment involved.
Read full review Ask as many questions you can before the install to understand the process. Since a third party does the installation your company is sort of a passanger and it is easy to get lost in the process. It also helps to have all users and IT support involved in the install to help increase the knowledge as to how SAS runs and what it needs to perform correctly.
Read full review Alternatives Considered RStudio was provided as the most customizable. It was also strictly the most feature-rich as far as enabling our organization to script, run, and make use of R open-source packages in our data analysis workstreams. It also provided some support for python, which was useful when we had R heavy code with some python threaded in. Overall we picked Rstudio for the features it provided for our data analysis needs and the ability to interface with our existing resources.
Read full review SAS was the incumbent tool, and what the team knew. We did look into using Revolution Analytics enterprise version of R, but the learning curve on that caused us to stick with SAS. In my current position, I've opted for WPS over SAS. I can still leverage my SAS experience, but the price is about 15% of what SAS charges, with extra functionality, such as direct database access. I can supplement WPS with free software, such R for anything that it might be missing.
Read full review Scalability RStudio is very scalable as a product. The issue I have is that it doesn't necessarily fit in nicely with the mainly Microsoft environment that everybody else is using. Having RStudio for us means dedicated servers and recruiting staff who know how to manage the environment. This isn't a fault of the product at all, it's just part of the data science landscape that we all have to put up with. Having said that RStudio is absolutely great for running on low spec servers and there are loads of options to handle concurrency, memory use, etc.
Read full review It all depends on the type of SAS product the user has. Scaleability differs from product to product, and if the user has SAS Office Analytics the scaleability is quite robust. This software will satisfy the majority of the company's analytic needs for years to come. In addition, if SAS is not meeting the users needs the company can easily find SAS solutions that will.
Read full review Return on Investment Using it for data science in a very big and old company, the most positive impact, from my point of view, has been the ability of spreading data culture across the group. Shortening the path from data to value. Still it's hard to quantify economic benefits, we are struggling and it's a great point of attention, since splitting out the contribution of the single aspects of a project (and getting the RStudio pie) is complicated. What is sure is that, in the long run, RStudio is boosting productivity and making the process in which is embedded more efficient (cost reduction). Read full review SAS is pretty expensive, so a company would need to take that into consideration before purchasing a license. A lot of companies are now starting to use SAS Advance Analytics, it is great for sharing data between departments. Presentations come out better when using SAS, and estimates are more precise to the confidence interval. Read full review ScreenShots