Using Discussion Forum Activity to Estimate Analytics Software Market Share

I’m finally getting around to overhauling the Discussion Forum Activity section of The Popularity of Data Analysis Software. To save you the trouble of reading all 43 pages, I’m posting just this section below.

Discussion Forum Activity

Another way to measure software popularity is to see how many people are helping one another use each package or language. While such data is readily available, it too has its problems. Menu-driven software like SPSS or workflow-driven software such as KNIME are quite easy to use and tend to generate fewer questions. Software controlled by programming requires the memorization of many commands and requiring more support. Even within languages, some are harder to use than others, generating more questions (see Why R is Hard to Learn).

Another problem with this type of data is that there are many places to ask questions and each has its own focus. Some are interested in a classical statistics perspective while others have a broad view of software as general-purpose programming languages. In recent years, companies have set up support sites within their main corporate web site, further splintering the places you can go to get help. Usage data for such sites is not readily available.

Another problem is that it’s not as easy to use logic to focus in on specific types of questions as it was with the data from job advertisements and scholarly articles discussed earlier. It’s also not easy to get the data across time to allow us to study trends.  Finally, the things such sites measure include: software group members (a.k.a. followers), individual topics (a.k.a. questions or threads), and total comments across all topics (a.k.a. total posts). This makes combining counts across sites problematic.

Two of the biggest sites used to discuss software are LinkedIn and Quora. They both display the number of people who follow each software topic, so combining their figures makes sense. However, since the sites lack any focus on analytics, I have not collected their data on general purpose languages like Java, MATLAB, Python or variants of C. The results of data collected on 10/17/2015 are shown here:

LinkedIn_Quora_2015

We see that R is the dominant software and that moving down through SAS, SPSS, and Stata results in a loss of roughly half the number of people in each step. Lavastorm follows Stata, but I find it odd that there was absolutely zero discussion of Lavastorm on Quora. The last bar that you can even see on this plot is the 62 people who follow Minitab. All the ones below that have tiny audiences of fewer than 10.

Next let’s examine two sites that focus only on statistical questions: Talk Stats and Cross Validated. They both report the number of questions (a.k.a. threads) for a given piece of software, allowing me to total their counts:

CrossValidated_TalkStats_2015

We see that R has a 4-to-1 lead over the next most popular package, SPSS. Stata comes in at 3rd place, followed by SAS. The fact that SAS is in fourth place here may be due to the fact that it is strong in data management and report writing, which are not the types of questions that these two sites focus on. Although MATLAB and Python are general purpose languages, I include them here because the questions on this site are within the realm of analytics. Note that I collected data on as many packages as were shown in the previous graph, but those not shown have a count of zero. Julia appears to have a count of zero due to the scale of the graph, but it actually had 5 questions on Cross Validated.

If you found this interesting, you can read about the results of other surveys and several other ways to measure software popularity here.

Is your organization still learning R?  I’d be happy to stop by and help. I also have a workshop, R for SAS, SPSS and Stata Users, on DataCamp.com. If you found this post useful, I invite you to follow me on Twitter.

Rexer Analytics Survey Results

Rexer Analytics has released preliminary results showing the usage of various data science tools. I’ve added the results to my continuously-updated article, The Popularity of Data Analysis Software. For your convenience, the new section is repeated below.

Surveys of Use

One way to estimate the relative popularity of data analysis software is though a survey. Rexer Analytics conducts such a survey every other year, asking a wide range of questions regarding data science (previously referred to as data mining by the survey itself.) Figure 6a shows the tools that the 1,220 respondents reported using in 2015.

Figure 6a. Analytics tools used.
Figure 6a. Analytics tools used by respondents to the Rexer Analytics Survey. In this view, each respondent was free to check multiple tools.

We see that R has a more than 2-to-1 lead over the next most popular packages, SPSS Statistics and SAS. Microsoft’s Excel Data Mining software is slightly less popular, but note that it is rarely used as the primary tool. Tableau comes next, also rarely used as the primary tool. That’s to be expected as Tableau is principally a visualization tool with minimal capabilities for advanced analytics.

The next batch of software appears at first to be all in the 15% to 20% range, but KNIME and RapidMiner are listed both in their free versions and, much further down, in their commercial versions. These data come from a “check all that apply” type of question, so if we add the two amounts, we may be over counting. However, the survey also asked,  “What one (my emphasis) data mining / analytic software package did you use most frequently in the past year?”  Using these data, I combined the free and commercial versions and plotted the top 10 packages again in figure 6b. Since other software combinations are likely, e.g. SAS and Enterprise Miner; SPSS Statistics and SPSS Modeler; etc. I combined a few others as well.

Figure 6b. The percent of survey respondents who checked each package as their primary tool.
Figure 6b. The percent of survey respondents who checked each package as their primary tool. Note that free and commercial versions of KNIME and RapidMiner are combined. Multiple tools from the same company are also combined. Only the top 10 are shown.

In this view we see R even more dominant, with over a 3-to-1 advantage compared to the software from IBM SPSS and SAS Institute. However, the overall ranking of the top three didn’t change. KNIME however rises from 9th place to 4th. RapidMiner rises as well, from 10th place to 6th. KNIME has roughly a 2-to-1 lead over RapidMiner, even though these two packages have similar capabilities and both use a workflow user interface. This may be due to RapidMiner’s move to a more commercially oriented licensing approach. For free, you can still get an older version of RapidMiner or a version of the latest release that is quite limited in the types of data files it can read. Even the academic license for RapidMiner is constrained by the fact that the company views “funded activity” (e.g. research done on government grants) the same as commercial work. The KNIME license is much more generous as the company makes its money from add-ons that increase productivity, collaboration and performance, rather than limiting analytic features or access to popular data formats.

If you found this interesting, you can read about the results of other surveys and several other ways to measure software popularity here.

Is your organization still learning R?  I’d be happy to stop by and help. I also have a workshop, R for SAS, SPSS and Stata Users, on DataCamp.com. If you found this post useful, I invite you to follow me on Twitter.