Is SAS better than R?
Christopher Snyder
Updated on March 16, 2026
In terms of handling and managing data, SAS is in a better position since the data is increasing at a huge pace day by day and SAS is better at handling it. Furthermore, R works only on RAM, and increasing the RAM as and when the data increases is not a feasible option. This is where R uses packages of plyr and dplyr.
Is SAS easier than R?
SAS is commercial software, so it needs a financial investment, whereas R is open source software, So, anyone can use it. SAS is the easiest tool to learn. So, people with limited knowledge of SQL can learn it easily; on the other hand, R programmers need to write tedious and lengthy codes.Should I learn R or SAS first?
If you already know R, then you should learn the basics of Python programming language before you start to learn the Python data mining ecosystem. So, don't think that R is difficult, and Python is easy to learn! SAS is extremely efficient at sequential data access, and database access through SQL is well integrated.Is SAS still relevant in 2021?
SAS is still used!SAS's popularity might be decreasing, but like all things in this domain, this is going to happen gradually and overtime. SAS might not see itself be completely out of all corporate environments ever, and there will likely still be a place for it in some ways going forward.