StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Code Collaboration
  4. Text Editor
  5. RStudio vs Visual Studio Code

RStudio vs Visual Studio Code

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

RStudio
RStudio
Stacks415
Followers455
Votes10
GitHub Stars4.9K
Forks1.1K
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code
Stacks186.5K
Followers169.1K
Votes2.3K
GitHub Stars178.2K
Forks35.9K

RStudio vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Comparison of RStudio and Visual Studio Code

RStudio and Visual Studio Code are two popular integrated development environments (IDEs) used for coding and programming. While they serve similar purposes, they have some key differences that set them apart. Here are six major differences between RStudio and Visual Studio Code:

  1. Language Support: RStudio is specifically designed for R programming and provides extensive support for statistical computing and graphics. On the other hand, Visual Studio Code is a versatile IDE that supports a wide range of programming languages including R, but also other programming languages like Python, JavaScript, and C++.

  2. Customizability: Visual Studio Code offers a high level of customizability through various extensions, themes, and settings. Users can personalize their coding environment to suit their preferences and workflow. In contrast, RStudio has a more standardized user interface, limiting the degree of customization.

  3. Integrated Development Environment: RStudio is a specialized IDE that offers a comprehensive set of tools for working with R. It provides an intuitive interface for data manipulation, visualization, and debugging tailored specifically for R programming. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, is a general-purpose code editor that can be used for multiple languages and requires additional extensions to provide similar functionality.

  4. Collaboration and Version Control: Visual Studio Code offers seamless integration with Git, a popular version control system, allowing for efficient collaboration and code management. RStudio also supports Git integration, but Visual Studio Code provides a more extensive set of features for version control.

  5. Debugging Capabilities: Both RStudio and Visual Studio Code support debugging, but they differ in their level of functionality. RStudio has a specialized debugging interface specifically designed for R, providing extensive debugging features like breakpoints, variable inspection, and stepping through code. Visual Studio Code also offers debugging support, but it may require additional configuration and extensions to match the comprehensive debugging capabilities of RStudio.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: RStudio has a strong and active community focused on R programming, providing extensive documentation, user support, and a wide range of packages tailored for statistical analysis and data science. Visual Studio Code, being a more general-purpose IDE, has a larger community and ecosystem that covers various programming languages, with active development and a larger number of extensions and plugins.

In summary, RStudio is a specialized IDE specifically designed for R programming, offering a tailored interface and extensive support for statistical analysis. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, is a versatile IDE that supports multiple programming languages and provides a high level of customizability. It offers extensive collaboration and version control features, but may require additional configuration for language-specific functionality compared to RStudio.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on RStudio, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar
Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M
Comments
Simon
Simon

Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Jan 9, 2020

Decided

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

1.29M views1.29M
Comments

Detailed Comparison

RStudio
RStudio
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code

An integrated development environment for R, with a console, syntax-highlighting editor that supports direct code execution. Publish and distribute data products across your organization. One button deployment of Shiny applications, R Markdown reports, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Collections of R functions, data, and compiled code in a well-defined format. You can expand the types of analyses you do by adding packages.

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Enhanced Security and Authentication; Administrative Tools; Metrics and Monitoring; Advanced Resource Management; Session Load Balancing; Team Productivity Enhancements; Priority Email Support.
Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars
4.9K
GitHub Stars
178.2K
GitHub Forks
1.1K
GitHub Forks
35.9K
Stacks
415
Stacks
186.5K
Followers
455
Followers
169.1K
Votes
10
Votes
2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 3
    Visual editor for R Markdown documents
  • 2
    In-line code execution using blocks
  • 1
    Sophitiscated statistical packages
  • 1
    In-line graphing support
  • 1
    Latex support
Pros
  • 341
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 310
    Fast
  • 194
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
Cons
  • 46
    Slow startup
  • 29
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 14
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools
Integrations
Jenkins
Jenkins
Docker
Docker
Windows
Windows
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to RStudio, Visual Studio Code?

JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

Atom

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana