Top quality R and Python products with excellent customer support
Updated January 25, 2022

Top quality R and Python products with excellent customer support

Chris Beeley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with RStudio

My team uses RStudio products, but we distribute reports and dashboards to 100+ users. The business problem it addresses is how to get the data science work that we're doing in R and Python (for example, text mining), as well as more day-to-day reporting based on some of the data structures that we have written in R/SQL.
  • 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.
  • I'm only a data scientist, I'm not DevOps, but I did find RStudio Connect hard to install. I have also tried and failed to get proxy authentication with Apache working, I'm sure it's me being thick but I have never gotten there with it.
  • Another thing I don't like is some of the abstractions in RStudio Connect. There isn't really a file system at all, and data refresh is done with a scheduled RMarkdown report, which is okay but it's a bit round the houses and it's very different from the code on my local machine.
  • I don't love the pricing model of RStudio Connect where you pay just as much for publishers as you do for consumers. I wish we could have, say, 5 publishers and more consumers on our current licence.
  • RStudio has enabled us to launch data science projects in the cloud at scale, which has brought in at least 10x more money than we spent on the licences.
  • RStudio products are nice to use for my staff and I think are good to retain good people.
  • RStudio allows us to put analytic products in the hands of managers rapidly, which is vitally important for us.
There are loads of people in the BI (Business Intelligence) space, of course... but I wouldn't touch any of them because none of them offer anything like the R and Python support that RStudio does. RStudio publishes open-source, they're a public benefit corporation, and they rock. RStudio also beats all other platforms (to the best of my awareness) on price.
If you've got a bit of Linux skills in your organisation, and if you have the money to pay for RStudio Connect (or RStudio Workbench on the development side) then I think RStudio is definitely a sound investment. If you don't have Linux skills, or your analysts are not sufficiently advanced in R to need to deploy stuff running live (and are just emailing stuff around, basically) then you're probably not ready yet.

Value of Using RStudio for Data Science

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.
I've never had any problems with RStudio that I didn't cause myself through incompetence.
There is no other platform that meets our needs. Even if it was terrible we would still use it but fortunately for us it is a very solid project with a great support team. I hope in the future to expand our use and get more licences as well as upgrade to RStudio workbench but for now we are very happy.

RStudio Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Premium support is included with all RStudio products, so we have it by default. It is great and we definitely need it because I am not the greatest at data ops and they are incredibly helpful with the whole stack, R to Linux
When we first got RStudio I had a lot of problems setting up LDAP with Active Directory, problems that were entirely my fault because I was quite new at that kind of thing. There was an awful lot of back and forth trying to get the whole thing working but they kept plugging away with suggestions and we managed to get it working in the end
First class support. Friendly, helpful, and they very often help me with stuff that isn't really anything to do with their product but just issues that I am having with the configuration of the server (for example, the problems I had when I upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04)