R
A free software environment and language for statistical computing and graphics.
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3 more ways to get R
Other download sites
Run by third parties, not by The R Foundation. Prefer the official page above when it works.
Package managers
- Chocolatey
choco install r - Homebrew
brew install r
About R
R is a language and environment for statistical analysis, data manipulation and plotting. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of Unix platforms, Windows and macOS, and is downloaded from CRAN mirrors. The wider ecosystem includes Bioconductor and R-Hub.
The project is active: version 4.6.1 was released on 2026-06-24. Manuals, FAQs and The R Journal are linked from the site. R suits statisticians, researchers and data analysts who need statistical methods and publication-quality graphics.
Strengths
- Broad set of statistical methods and graphics
- Runs on Windows, macOS and many Unix platforms
- Large package ecosystem distributed through CRAN and Bioconductor
- Regular releases
Limitations
- Downloads are spread across CRAN mirrors rather than a single page
- The language has quirks that take time to learn for programmers from other languages
Details
- Pricing
- FreeFree software, supported by donations to the R Foundation.
- License
- GPL-2.0-or-later
- Developer
- The R Foundation
- Platforms
- Windows, macOS, Linux, Command line
- How it runs
- Downloadable app
- Account
- Not required
- Works offline
- Yes
- Best suited for
- Statisticians and researchers doing data analysis and plotting
- Categories
- Developer tools
- Last verified
- Added
- Provenance
- Facts checked against the developer's own pages and store listings, 1 sources on file.
Alternatives to R
Compare allSoftware that can replace R for an important use case, and what changes if you switch.
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 necessarily 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.
