Which one is best, SAS or R?

The field of Data Science is growing faster and a number of opportunities are growing into the field. There are a million bytes of data created every day and the number of new opportunities growing every day. Whether you are a Data analyst, a Business Analyst or a Data Scientist, you should know how to work with data. You should have the relevant skills in your hand to make you manage the Data and create some useful insights. Sometimes you may have the relevant knowledge and the desired curiosity but with the absence of some specific tools used in the field, it really becomes hard to find some meaningful insights out of your data. There is always a question that arises to the aspiring candidates who are keen to explore into the field- "What skills should I learn to develop a career in Data Science?" Whenever this question arises we try to look at different platforms and acquire knowledge over the relevant topics, which is obviously the best one can do.

This time I have come up with an article highlighting the comparison between SAS and R which are very popular in the field of Data Analysis and Data Science. I will try to brief you both of them with a slight comparison between the two to make you understand what exactly they are and what sets them apart from each other. Let's begin:

SAS which stands for Statistical Analysis System is a software which is used for Data mining, Statistical Analysis, Business Intelligence, and Data Management. You can find its importance by looking at these salient features which it provides. On one hand, it is helping in finding and extracting useful information out of some raw data while at the other also managing the data. R, on the other hand, is a Programming Language which is used by the majority of the businesses working with data (especially with Big Data) today for Statistical Computing.

SAS has its exceptional feature of providing statistical analysis which is needed by every business today to generate statistical visualization to help them predict the patterns and take impactful decisions needed for business growth. The statistical features provided by R also finds great usage in Data mining and Data Analysis and so very popular among Data Scientists and Analysts.

The source code of R is free to its users which makes it further popular among statisticians to use. While it is not the case with SAS which is quite costlier than R. Companies involved in startups or cost-effective management generally prefer R over SAS due to its open source nature.

The Graphics supported by R and its statistical features are considered better than SAS by people using it.

If we will look at the customer service support provided by SAS, then obviously SAS will be preferred over R as R lacks customer service support.

If you are a beginner and want to know the learning problems faced when learning SAS and R and the easier one to learn between the two of them than I must tell you that learning R is a bit difficult than SAS as much what I did research. But it is also a noteworthy point that R is the most sought after language other than Python. So it's a good choice if you try to learn R over SAS.

Talking about Handling Big Data and storage capacity, SAS is preferred over R not because R is not good at handling big data but the storage facility is not provided with R while SAS is good at storing facility.

I hope the above brief comparison will give you insight about SAS and R. While there is no point in the comparison between two things but a slight comparison gives us a fairer idea of learning and differentiating things.

Source: HOB

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