R
What it is: Statistical computing language. Built by statisticians for statisticians. Best stats packages anywhere.
What It Does Best
Statistical analysis. Every statistical test exists in R. New methods appear in R first.
Tidyverse ecosystem. dplyr, ggplot2, tidyr—modern, consistent data manipulation and visualization.
Academic research. Reproducible research tools. R Markdown for papers. Standard in many fields.
Pricing
Free. Open source.
When to Use It
✅ Statistical analysis is your main job
✅ Academic or research environment
✅ Publication-quality visualizations (ggplot2)
✅ Need specific statistical methods
When NOT to Use It
❌ Building ML production systems (Python better)
❌ General-purpose programming (Python better)
❌ Web development or APIs (wrong tool)
Bottom line: If statistics is your core work, R is unbeatable. For everything else, Python wins. Many data scientists know both.