When comparing Minitab vs R, the Slant community recommends R for most people. In the question“What are the best statistical software tools?” R is ranked 1st while Minitab is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose R is:
There are lots of different packages available that can be easily searched from the CRAN repo site and downloaded, or installed via the R command line interface. These packages are easy to include in a project or source file, and pertain to a wide variety of topics, from classification, social media analysis, and text processing to interactive 3d plotting and networks (including neural nets).
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Useful help/wizard
The help menu and wizard tabs are easy to understand. The Quality Trainer is exceptional, but costs extra.
Pro Well known
This software is an industry standard.
Pro Lots of packages available
There are lots of different packages available that can be easily searched from the CRAN repo site and downloaded, or installed via the R command line interface. These packages are easy to include in a project or source file, and pertain to a wide variety of topics, from classification, social media analysis, and text processing to interactive 3d plotting and networks (including neural nets).
Pro Has a wide range of options when it comes to IDEs/GUIs
Among the IDEs available there are several commercial applications as well as free and/or open-source ones, such as R Studio, which features syntax highlighting, project management capabilities, integrated terminal access, decent code completion and on-the-spot parameter hinting, graphical interfaces for package installation and such, and commendable extensibility/developer support.