RStudio
Hacker ApprovedRanked 21 of 33 IDEs by recommenders
Favored as the best R data science IDE, praised for making everything inspectable. Critics find its support for Git and LLM tools weak.
Favored as the best R data science IDE, praised for making everything inspectable. Critics find its support for Git and LLM tools weak.
18 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 12
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 67%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 12 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Best and most widely used data science IDE
“RStudio is still the best data science IDE and it's not even close.”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “A Better R Programming Experience Thanks to Tree-sitter” “at this point, I literally don't know anyone who doesn't use it”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “A Better R Programming Experience Thanks to Tree-sitter” Makes R easy to inspect
“I loved that everything in RStudio was so easily inspectable”
Comment from 3 Sep 2026 in “Pre-Release of Polars 2.0” “RStudio makes R seem like scriptable excel”
Comment from 18 Jan 2026 in “Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Weak support for Git and LLM tools
“RStudio is great when you are doing your own thing, but when it comes to more generic tools like Git, LLM, Autoformatting etc. it's a hard pass.”
Comment from 28 Nov 2025 in “Migrating to Positron, a next-generation data science IDE for Python and R” “the support for LLM coding tools in RStudio is so bare bones”
Comment from 28 Nov 2025 in “Migrating to Positron, a next-generation data science IDE for Python and R”
Other IDEs people recommend
The four most recommended other IDEs, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JetBrains IDEs | 233 | 143 | 62% | 13 | 10 yrs39 owners | — |
| IntelliJ IDEA | 206 | 105 | 66% | 13 | 10 yrs18 owners | — |
| Microsoft Visual Studio | 165 | 165 | 50% | 12 | 10 yrs10 owners | — |
| Delphi | 126 | 44 | 74% | 13 | 23 yrs4 owners | Approved |
| RStudioThis page | 12 | 6 | 67% | 6 | — | Approved |
What people said
15 of the 18 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I loved that everything in RStudio was so easily inspectable”
“RStudio has a bunch of frills I don't care about and doesn't let me configure files as I'd like.”
“RStudio is still the best data science IDE and it's not even close.”
“at this point, I literally don't know anyone who doesn't use it”
“RStudio IDE has had them for years and years.”
“even RStudio for math and science as tools”
“RStudio makes R seem like scriptable excel”
“mandriva-derived distributions are some of the few that have RStudio packaged in the repositories”
“I use RStudio, which is open source”
“some major design flaws Rstudio has”
“But the community can maintain it.”
“RStudio is great when you are doing your own thing, but when it comes to more generic tools like Git, LLM, Autoformatting etc. it's a hard pass.”
“the support for LLM coding tools in RStudio is so bare bones”
“RStudio has switched from being a "real" desktop app to another webview-based thing”
“RStudio, for example will happily run code and keep variables around that you don't reference any longer”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.