Austin based Enthought offers their flagship scientific Python distribution, Canopy. The Canopy Geoscience (or Canopy Geo) variant of the product is a data analysis, exploration and visualization package optimized for geologists & geophysicists, and researchers in petroleum science.
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Spyder
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Spyder is a free and open source scientific environment for Python. It combines advanced editing, analysis, debugging, and profiling, with data exploration, interactive execution, deep inspection, and visualization capabilities. Spyder is sponsored by open source supporters QuanSight, and NumFOCUS, as well as individual donors.
Enthought Canopy is best suites for scripting data analytical concepts. It has a wide range of data analytical libraries and also is good for data visualization. I would not recommend using Enthought Canopy only as an IDE, there may be better options available. If you're looking for a good data simulation & visualization package, Canopy it is.
Spyder is an open-source Python IDE designed for the movement of data science work. Spyder comes with an Anaconda package manager distribution, so depending on your setup you may have installed it on your machine.
Spyder includes most of the "standard IDE" features you can expect, such as a strong syntax code editor, Python code rendering, and an integrated text browser.
Spyder is used when we want to develop a code that is useful and able to explore proper documentation of the code that has been written. We use Spyder to perform data-related operations like filtration, cleaning, and enhancing the data qualities. There some cases where it is less appropriate like working in an environment, creating dashboards of data visualizations and plots.
Providing scientific libraries, both open source and Enthought's own libraries which are excellent.
Training. They provide several courses in python for general use and for data analysis.
Debugging tools. Several IDEs provides tools for debugging, but I think they are insufficient or too general. Canopy has a special debugging tool, specially design for python.
It is fairly straightforward to use. Pretty much good to go as soon as you install it. The IDE itself is very user friendly, and it is only limited by whatever limitations Python has as a language. Great for those who want to run their scripts quickly or do some Python programming without fussing.
Most of data scientists or data engineers are either using ec2 on the cloud or Atom or PyCharm locally. It is a bit hard to find people who are still using Spyder and have the sight of the IDE and can help you to answer your question.
Before Canopy with its python we were working with Matlab. We decided for Canopy against Matlab for two reasons: First, we believe that python together with NumPy or SciPy can achieve the objectives with less code and therefore less training, and second the prizes are much lower than matlab which is most robust, expensive and less intuitive. It's clear we are making the comparison with python and it has nothing to with canopy. But with Canopy you feel you have all those tools close together without the problem of configuration, besides a lot of personalized libraries that complements a typical python environment.
I think Spyder doesn't stack up as well as other IDEs due to its many limitations. But it is available for free and that is one advantage it has over its competitors