R Programming By Example

Comparing R with other software

My intention for this section is not to provide a comprehensive comparison between R and other software, but to simply point out a few of R's most noticeable features. If you can, I encourage you to test other software yourself so that you know first-hand what may be the best tool for the job at hand.

The most noticeable feature of R compared to other statistical software such as SAS, Stata, SPSS, and even Python, is the very large number of packages that it has available. At the time of writing this, there are almost 12,000 packages published in The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) (https://cran.r-project.org/), and this does not include packages published in other places, such as Git repositories. This ...