2.6 Alternatives to R

R has many advantages, but it has one critical issue: the learning curve. R is a command-line driven analysis tool, which means you type out specific commands for almost everything single thing R does. Excel is pretty user friendly, and several stats programs similarly use point-and-click interfaces, such as SPSS, JMP, and Stata SAS also requires a lot of command writing, but is generally consider more user friendly than R.

Recently, two free point-and-click statistical analysis programs have been release that are built on R but require no programming. JASP (“Just another statistics program”) has an emphasis on Bayesian statistics, particularly Bayesian hypothesis testing using Bayes factors (an approach increasing in popularity, especially in psychology, but which some Bayesians, like Andrew Gelman, disavow). While JASP is based on R, it does not currently allow access to the underlying R code.

Jamovi has a similar spirit as JASP (indeed, it was founded by developers who had worked on JASP) but is more transparent about the underlying R code being used to run the analysis.