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RStudio - a beginner's perspective
January 21, 2020

RStudio - a beginner's perspective

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with RStudio

Most analysts in my organisation use Excel for simple tasks and for advanced analysis, use SPSS or SAS. The license costs for SPSS and SAS are substantial and I along with few other analysts are now transitioning to using R with its integrated development environment RStudio. This has cut down cost for us as RStudio is free and open source and does not require annual license costs. With a bit of learning RStudio can be equally good as SAS or SPSS, although there's a steep learning curve involved especially for users who have not used any scripting language in the past and are used to drop-down menus and pre-formatted statistical output.
  • Data manipulation in RStudio is a breeze. It is an exceptional product when it comes to creating data subsets from an existing data, creating calculating columns and storing data and plots as objects.
  • Everything in RStudio is done via writing script. It can be tedious to begin with but once you have written all your data manipulation and analysis in a script, it becomes very easy to maintain and edit it and run it again and again without having to remember the steps like in other statistical software.
  • When you first start with RStudio, you need to install and then reference them in your script. In my view RStudio should come with pre-installed packages that most fundamental to any data analysis. Few example packages are 'dplyr' and 'ggplot.'
  • While everything in RStudio is achieved via writing script, it should include more point and click tasks such as right-clicking temporary datasets and removing them.
  • RStudio is open-source and free. Any organisations would love to use it as long as it can meet their objectives.
  • RStudio community is growing with each passing year. If it's promoted by the organisation and training and other support can be offered to tempt analysts to switch to RTStudio, huge costs savings can be made in the future.

RStudio has a huge repository of packages. There are over 10,000 packages in their central repository and this number is growing at a constant rate. These packages allow you to perform tasks that are not offered by any other statistical software unless you purchase their expensive add-ons.

On the other hand commercial statistical software have been around for a long time and are specifically targeted towards statistical analysis. Therefore, performing common statistical tasks in such software would take a few minutes. The same process in RStudio might take much longer as one has to build their statistical analysis output bit by bit.

RStudio is free and open-source and has a huge user base. Getting any help with syntax or any other issue is as easy as searching for it online. RStudio also provides extensive documentation through various manuals, books, journals as well as the contributed documentation of their package repository(CRAN) website. The R community has many online forums to assist it users and users are setting up local chapters where they can physically meet and exchange ideas.

Do you think Posit delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Posit's feature set?

Yes

Did Posit live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Posit go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Posit again?

Yes

RStudio is a free product, therefore, you can utilise this tool without any requirement for a licence. It is excellent tool for data manipulation and performing tasks that can't be done by any other software. For example RStudio allows you to install packages that can directly analyse your Google Scholar profile data and predict your citation index over the next 10 years. Other examples include accessing and analysing movies data from www.imdb.com and creating a word cloud directly from a website. In my knowledge, no other software allows you to do that with an ease that can be done in RStudio and did I mention that 'it's free'!

R (language) and RStudio has a steep learning curve. Therefore, it is not ideal for people who are beginners in programming. Creating a statistical analysis output in RStudio is like putting together each statistical output value bit by bit. There are no nice outputs that can be generated by just clicking few options. The scripting and variables are case sensitive which can make it sometimes hard to diagnose an error in your script.