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RStudio is the only IDE you need for R
Updated September 03, 2021

RStudio is the only IDE you need for R

Jake Tolbert | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with RStudio

I used RStudio to do the overwhelming majority of my data analysis, which includes general direct mail-style campaign selection, statistical analysis, predictive modeling, and reporting. It gives me a single environment to work in where I can do SQL-style work, statistical work and reporting--in essence, if it involves data, I'll do it in RStudio.
  • RStudio ticks most of the IDE boxes for R users: autocompletion, an overview of your current environment, an interface for files in the working directory and a way to interact with plots in the GUI.
  • Combined with the tidyverse set of packages, you can do most of your database work, plus work faster and smarter, in both the interactive environment and in scripts.
  • RStudio's snippets functionality allows you to quickly access the bits of boilerplate code you find yourself typing over and over and to paste them in with just a few keypresses.
  • Though they're currently developing ways to extend RStudio, ie. add-ons, the environment and hooks needed are still fairly limited.
  • Package management is available, but could be simplified even further.
  • Git integration is great and provides are really useful way to view diffs. However, I still run into a few bugs here and there that force me to drop back to the terminal.
  • RStudio is free, so the ROI is off the charts. It has sped up our business processes exponentially over the tools we were using the past, and allows me to write reproducible code every time.
  • Rodeo
I tried Rodeo when it was first released--it didn't have the polish that RStudio has. Other alternatives like Jupiter notebooks address different needs and aren't really comparable.
RStudio is a must if you've doing any work at all in R--there's simply not a better tool. I've looked into other IDEs including Rodeo--they're just not nearly as polished or effective. RStudio is a mediocre SQL client, but can function as such if need be. The terminal support added recently is useful, but again, the heart of RStudio is semi-interactive work in R.

Using RStudio

5 - The folks that use RStudio are all data analysts. Most of us have other job functions as well, so we share an assortment of duties, devleoping data products in SQL, Tableau, R and occasionally Python.
We don't have any support for RStudio, but outside of things like connections to institutional databases, not a lot of support is needed. It's robust and standalone.
  • developing predictive models
  • creating forecast models
  • classification based on NLP
  • developing widely used ranking scores
  • create very specific/targeted forecasts on the fly w Tableau integration
  • develop expected performance models to help understand staff performance
RStudio is a integral part of my daily workflow. I don't see myself ever NOT using RStudio