Alternatives to R
A free software environment and language for statistical computing and graphics. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
R
A free software environment and language for statistical computing and graphics.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as R.
Python
A general-purpose programming language used for scripting, web backends, data analysis and machine learning.
Python moves statistical work into a general-purpose language that is the default for data analysis and machine learning tooling. It has readable syntax but is slower on CPU-heavy work.
Julia
A fast, dynamically typed programming language for technical and scientific computing.
Julia compiles to native code through LLVM for fast numerical computing and has an interactive REPL. Its package ecosystem is smaller than R's, and first runs can be slow.
SageMath
A free open-source mathematics system built on NumPy, SciPy, Maxima, GAP and many other packages.
SageMath is a free mathematics system that combines many libraries behind a Python-based language and suits computer algebra. It is a large install and needs WSL on Windows.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
RStudio
A free, open-source IDE for R with a data viewer, environment pane and support for Python and SQL.
Positron
A free data science IDE for Python and R from the makers of RStudio.
Jupyter
Browser-based notebooks, JupyterLab and the classic Notebook, that combine live code, text and visualizations.
JupyterLab
A web-based interactive environment for notebooks, code and data, used widely in data science.
marimo
Reactive Python notebook stored as a plain script.
Spyder
An open-source Python IDE for scientific work with a variable explorer and an IPython console.
