RStudio Desktop Reviews - Pros & Cons, Ratings & more

PyCharm

Wing Python IDE

Visual Studio Code

Stata

RStudio is a data science program that enables users to develop, collaborate, manage, and share data in R and Python.

RStudio Desktop

Windows

Business Analyst

The layout and ease of use is superb, there are functions for just about any statistical operation you need to carry out in R Studio.

Marine biologist student

I can analyze and get beautiful and explanatory graphics in a few minutes. The coding part is very handy and it can be editing and saved so you do not lose any code or project for the future.

Software

RStudio makes coding in R easy, helpful, and powerful, with a friendly interface and plenty of tools.

Consultant

The problem of backwards compatibility of different versions of R and R packages is not an RStudio problem, and RStudio works with all versions of R and R packages.

Data Analytics Manager

I like the completeness of RStudio as an IDE. It has lots of useful features and integrations with R packages that just boosts my productivity.

Data Science Manager

The best IDE for R programmers. Overall great functionality and easy of use.

Mathematics Teacher

Overall R studio is an excellent product and a great tool to supplement teaching statistics and algebra II at the high school level and any statistics and data science class at the college algebra.

Research Assistant

I typically use RStudio to solve research issues such as data analysis of growth mindset. I would highly recommend it for free, convenient data analyses.

Temporary Instructor

It's a great software which generate outputs very easily using a coding system. And also it includes thousands of useful packages.

R-studio allows a much more user friendly use of R. It integrates four basic screens (script, console and 2 support screens for help, environment, etc) and features like markdown.

Technology Specialist

R is one of the simplest programming languages and R-studio makes full use of its capabilities. The R community is amazing and provides immense support where needed.

Management

Being able to manipulate large datasets and perform complex calculations with ease has greatly improved efficiency in the company.

Postdoctoral Scholar

There are no major dislikes about R studio, being a free software it does depend on the open source community for continuing development, which can be arguably not beneficial to the software.

Student

It's hard to work in team as is not an online platform.

Free Lancer

I use its cloud-saving feature to save my projects. Talking about price it also comes with a free version, you can use that too but it has limited features like Priority Email Support.

It is the swiss army tool of a data-scientist. Thanks to its huge community any doubt you may have can be replied easily by a simple search on internet, or by asking in forums.

Statistician

There is a learning curve at first, and do to the amount of information available and packages that can be used, it can be hard to narrow down at first what functions to use when.

R Studio - larger learning curve than SPSS but will save you money.

IBM SPSS Statistics

MATLAB

Microsoft Excel

SAS-STAT Software

In my opinion, Rstudio provides the best environment to be used by statisticians and data scientists. The software is great and its supporting website provides a lot of tutorials. 

The best suite for R programmer

In terms of statistical modeling and analysis, R is one of the most used programming languages.

The sophisticated features and tools of R make it a fantastic choice for researchers.

Overall it seems like a very worthwhile platform, but extremely time consuming learn the basics. This can be frustrating and discouraging. 

Many functionalities but large learning curve

Is great! You start to reduce your fear and anxiety using this software, it is very intuitive and user friendly.

Great way to start coding.

We use it for testing purposes and to analyze our exams in detail and so far it has provided invaluable data.

R used to assess the quality of the examination/testing in the department

R was my first love when it comes to coding/data analysis. The ability to easily access the terminal, console, and script all at once is great, but the tool really shines in the ability to  easily work with data and graphs. No other IDE does such a great job at making it easy to explore files, data frames, and graphs.

Best IDE I've ever used... Wish I could use it for any language!

Using R Studio has been a breeze. I used it to learn with R and ts built-in tools helped me in that journey 

Best IDE for R 

RStudio is what makes R accessible

Overall, this software is great and makes my day to day life much easier. There aren't many issues to complain about. 

Best tool to use when working in R

I've been using RStudio for almost a decade now, and it keeps getting better every year. There are new features, new conveniences, and it's simply the best environment for writing and executing R code.

RStudio : The Reigning Champ for Data Science in R

RYouWithMe

The user interface is friendly enough and easy to navigate through for beginners  and the tools and capabilities are very satisfactory  for advanced users. So  R-Studio is a great product for a wide range of users.

Best IDE for R

Great open-source software for statisticians by statisticians

Overall, an excellent IDE for the R language. Not as smooth and bug-free as could be.

Excellent IDE for R.

With R-Studio, my data analysis tasks at work have been made easier. Its probably the best IDE for R available.

Experience using R-Studio

Research and working with collaborators across labs and at other institutions are made easy.

RStudio is the best

Love every bit of using R, for creating fancy looking visualizations - graphs, maps, and interactive plots.

One and only IDE for R users in statistics and data science

Overall R studio is an excellent product and a great tool to supplement teaching statistics and algebra II at the high school level and any statistics and data science class at the college algebra. 

R Studio Review

Very satisfied with it, easy to use and exactly what you need to work as a research student that analyzes a lot of data. 

Very useful for research

I have been using RStudio Desktop as a Biomedical Science student as part of my courses Applied Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. It is a powerful tool that provides an IDE for data analysis and visualization with R.  RStudio Desktop has a user-friendly and intuitive interface which makes it easy to write and execute code, manage packages and libraries, and visualize data all in one place. In addition, one important aspect is its collaboration features and its ability to share projects, code, and data with classmates via GitHub or RStudio Cloud, which has been helpful during team projects. Additionally, the software comes with an excellent integration with the ggplot2 library that allows the creation of attractive plots in no time, perfect for school reports. Overall, I would highly recommend RStudio Desktop to any science student for data analysis and visualization.

RStudio Desktop review as a student

I used r-studio to clean/visualize data and run analyses for a psychology study I worked on. It helped me build on my basic statistical knowledge and gain confidence in my querying.

Awesome free analytical software

Although I have less than a year in experience with rstudio, I have been able to improve the throughput of my work reporting while simultaneously improving the appearance of my data outputs and graphics.

Versatile and Essential for Professional-Looking Reports

R-studio is the main integrated development environment (IDE) for R and it is very good.

R-Studio - the main IDE for R

Quite satisfied and content for R programming with RStudio

Excellent IDE and platform for R programming

Chief Data Scientist

Christopher P.:                                        Hi, I'm Chris, Chief Data Scientist. And I give RStudio five stars out of five. More reviews click below.
                                                       So the softwares that we looked at, we looked at, obviously, things like Tableau for visualization. We looked at the raw IDEs for Python and R. We looked at very expensive packages, like [inaudible 00:00:19] for example, and pretty much tried everything on the market when it comes to an integrated IDE for data science.
                                                       So, RStudio, we chose for a few reasons. One, cost. It is open source software, which is awfully nice to be able to have that be zero cost. Two, is the environment itself is very friendly in terms of the ability for you to do your work. So you have a lot of configurability, but it does have a lot of conveniences built in that. Obviously, some of which are integrated into the R language itself, but a lot of them, like package management for example, is built right in. And it's optimized for data science and analytics, where you can take a look at what variables are in your environment and things, be able to manipulate data frames and use some of the gooey as well as all the power of command lines and scripts within one environment. So it's this really nice all in one Swiss army knife for data science, that's very, very difficult to find competing packages. I constantly wish I could find something like it for Python, because a lot of stuff is in the Python language. But for anything in R, it is the default by far.
                                                       So integration is actually handled by our enterprise package management software. So we use Homebrew, because we're a Mac OS shop, and it's super easy to get started. You simply install it through Homebrew and then it's automatically maintained when you just run your maintenance cycles. Getting started with R itself, again, very straightforward. You have your R environment, your environmental variables and all the things that you would expect to be in enterprise level software and your package match maintainment we use the package manager. So again, it keeps things up to date, keeps things organized, and you don't have to worry too much about dependencies in your packages because the software handles that. And RStudio also does a really good job of identifying when you're using commands or functions that aren't in packages that are installed, what package they're from, and then offers to install it for you. So from a getting started perspective, it's really made it very easy.
                                                       For other people considering RStudio, it really depends on the skill level of the person that you're working with. It is still a programming environment, programming language. So if you have users who are looking for a no code environment, RStudio is not the right choice, right? It is a coding environment. They'd be better served by a tool like, for example, a Watson studio or Tableau something a little easier. For experienced users who are coders, make sure that they spend time configuring the environment to what's comfortable so that it works for them. Again it's a very configurable piece of software and what comes out of the box may not be right for you.
                                                       And there are all these little add-ons here and there that I think are worth spending some time with the software. What theme you use, for example, it has great support for dark mode. There are certain fonts like Fira code that make it even friendlier and easier to use. Fira font code, for example, it uses ligatures. So when you're looking at your code in RStudio, it's easier to read, it's easier to interpret, because the ligatures look coherent. So there's lots of little niceties, but all that come from experience from time working with the software, from talking to other users and user groups and all those things I think would be make it an even better choice for when you're working with any kind of data science in R language.

RStudio Desktop Reviews (2025)

Pros and cons

120 reviews