Posit vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Posit
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Posit, formerly RStudio, is a modular data science platform, combining open source and commercial products.N/A
Visual Studio
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Visual Studio (now in the 2022 edition) is a 64-bit IDE that makes it easier to work with bigger projects and complex workloads, boasting a fluid and responsive experience for users. The IDE features IntelliCode, its automatic code completion tools that understand code context and that can complete up to a whole line at once to drive accurate and confident coding.
$45
per month
Pricing
PositMicrosoft Visual Studio
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PositVisual Studio
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
PositMicrosoft Visual Studio
Considered Both Products
Posit
Chose Posit
I used them to run Python codes, so that not really comparable here. I will describe my experience around it. I feel that Jupyter Notebook is the closest product to RMarkdown file, as it allows users to run line by line and share outcomes underneath. PyCharm and Visual Studio …
Chose Posit
RStudio has multiple products like desktop, server and server pro. Within RStudio, one can create multiple tabs of R code, and it is easier to work in this development environment.
Another advantage that I see in RStudio is saving the environment variables. Environment variables …
Chose Posit
RStudio is a much better environment for R than IBM Data Science Experience as it provides with a much wider variety of tools.
Chose Posit
Slower to reach ROI since it is more expensive. Rstudio also provides full text editor which is very powerful to play around with data. Also, cross platform feature which lets user to work in any operating system whether windows or mac gives Rstudio huge advantage over other …
Visual Studio

No answer on this topic

Features
PositMicrosoft Visual Studio
Platform Connectivity
Comparison of Platform Connectivity features of Product A and Product B
Posit
9.3
27 Ratings
11% above category average
Microsoft Visual Studio
-
Ratings
Connect to Multiple Data Sources8.026 Ratings00 Ratings
Extend Existing Data Sources9.927 Ratings00 Ratings
Automatic Data Format Detection9.926 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Exploration
Comparison of Data Exploration features of Product A and Product B
Posit
9.0
27 Ratings
7% above category average
Microsoft Visual Studio
-
Ratings
Visualization8.027 Ratings00 Ratings
Interactive Data Analysis10.024 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Preparation
Comparison of Data Preparation features of Product A and Product B
Posit
10.0
26 Ratings
20% above category average
Microsoft Visual Studio
-
Ratings
Interactive Data Cleaning and Enrichment10.024 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Transformations10.026 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform Data Modeling
Comparison of Platform Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
Posit
10.0
22 Ratings
18% above category average
Microsoft Visual Studio
-
Ratings
Multiple Model Development Languages and Tools10.022 Ratings00 Ratings
Single platform for multiple model development10.022 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-Service Model Delivery10.019 Ratings00 Ratings
Model Deployment
Comparison of Model Deployment features of Product A and Product B
Posit
9.9
18 Ratings
15% above category average
Microsoft Visual Studio
-
Ratings
Flexible Model Publishing Options10.018 Ratings00 Ratings
Security, Governance, and Cost Controls9.915 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
PositMicrosoft Visual Studio
Small Businesses
Jupyter Notebook
Jupyter Notebook
Score 8.6 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mathematica
Mathematica
Score 7.0 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 8.2 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
PositMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(123 ratings)
9.0
(105 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.7
(17 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(4 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Availability
9.4
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.9
(9 ratings)
8.8
(15 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.3
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.2
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
PositMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
Posit (formerly RStudio)
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.
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Microsoft
When working with base C# code for desktop and web projects, then Microsoft Visual Studio is ideal as it provides the libraries and interfaces needed to quickly create, test and deploy solutions. It is when slightly more complex scenarios are required that issues can arise. The built-in integration for things like PowerBI Paginated Reports and dashboards is far from ideal.
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Pros
Posit (formerly RStudio)
  • 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.
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Microsoft
  • I like how the tabs and panels are organized; everything is gathered together so you can find what you're looking for quickly.
  • If you can't find something, there's a thorough search engine that searches all of Visual Studio's features.
  • The Team Foundation Server feature is fantastic since it allows us to easily deploy and roll back changes on the server.
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Cons
Posit (formerly RStudio)
  • 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.
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Microsoft
  • Would be great if there was a better way to save and restore open tabs.
  • The built-in test runner can be improved, for example, by adding the ability to save a set of commonly run tests, etc.
  • Better integration for Microsoft SQL server would be great.
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Likelihood to Renew
Posit (formerly RStudio)
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.
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Microsoft
VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.
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Usability
Posit (formerly RStudio)
For someone who learns how to use the software and picks up on the "language" of R, it's very easy to use. For beginners, it can be hard and might require a course, as well as the appropriate statistical training to understand what packages to use and when
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Microsoft
I love the overall usability of Microsoft Visual Studio. I’ve been using this IDE for more than 20 years, and I’ve seen it evolve by leaps and bounds. Today, with AI and code-suggestion/completion features, developers no longer need to remember countless libraries, methods, or language syntax, or invest a huge amount of programming effort to complete a project. It truly offers everything a developer needs to program, debug, test, and deploy in a single IDE.
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Reliability and Availability
Posit (formerly RStudio)
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
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Posit (formerly RStudio)
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.
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Microsoft
There are many resources available supporting Visual Studio IDE. Microsoft whitepapers, forum posts, and online Visual Studio documentation. There are countless demonstration videos available, as well. If users are having issues, they can call Microsoft Support, but depending on the company's agreement with Microsoft, the number of included support calls will vary from organization to organization. I've found that Microsoft support calls can be hit or miss depending on who you get, but they can usually get you with the right support person for your issue.
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In-Person Training
Posit (formerly RStudio)
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
IT is very complicated to understand all the functions that the environment has if you are not familiar with this type of development environments. It is important to select a good in-person training to achieve to understand all the possibilities and the capacity of the application. In this case, you will be able to develop a lot type of different applications.
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Online Training
Posit (formerly RStudio)
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
If you are not accustomed to develop in this type of development environments it would be complicated to follow all the parts of the course because if the course does not include a great tour with all the concepts to develop you will not have the option to understand all the functions.
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Implementation Rating
Posit (formerly RStudio)
We did it at the individual level: anyone willing to code in R can use it. No real deployment involved.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Posit (formerly RStudio)
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.
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Microsoft
I personally feel Visual Studio IDE has [a] better interface and [is more] user friendly than other IDEs. It has better code maintainability and intellisense. Its inbuilt team foundation server help coders to check on their code then and go. Better nugget package management, quality testing and gives features to extract TRX file as result of testing which includes all the summary of each test case.
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Scalability
Posit (formerly RStudio)
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.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Posit (formerly RStudio)
  • 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).
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Microsoft
  • Using the integration between Visual Studio and our source control service, the cost of re-work and losing code is drastically reduced.
  • Paid versions of Visual Studio enable developers to be so much more productive than hacked-together open source solutions that it's hard to imagine developing in Windows without it.
  • When combined with support subscriptions and the vast array of free online help options available, Visual Studio saves our developers time by keeping them coding and testing, not wasting their time trying to guess their way out of problems or spend endless hours online hoping to find answers.
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ScreenShots

Posit Screenshots

Screenshot of Posit runs on most desktops or on a server and accessed over the webScreenshot of Posit supports authoring HTML, PDF, Word Documents, and slide showsScreenshot of Posit supports interactive graphics with Shiny and ggvisScreenshot of Shiny combines the computational power of R with the interactivity of the modern webScreenshot of Remote Interactive Sessions: Start R and Python processes from Posit Workbench within various systems such as Kubernetes and SLURM with Launcher.Screenshot of Jupyter: Author and edit Python code with Jupyter using the same Posit Workbench infrastructure.