Feature Parity with RStudio/RStudio Server

[SuhasSrinivasan]

Dear Posit Team,

Appreciate all the work that has gone towards developing and maintaining RStudio, RStudio Server, Posit Workbench and many other tools necessary for data scientists in diverse areas, especially in biology, medicine and related fields.

I have used R and RStudio for the last 10 years on a daily basis, and essentially RStudio == R!

Having said that, I understand Positron is being developed as the next-generation IDE to enable new features and experiences.
However, there is a lot of friction at the moment to use Positron and lack of feature parity.

For data scientists who need a reliable and easy-to-use IDE, is RStudio still the recommended platform?

[austin3dickey]

Hey @SuhasSrinivasan, thanks for the question! This section of our docs has some comprehensive thoughts around this question: https://positron.posit.co/faqs.html#is-rstudio-going-away

Let me know if there's anything else you're wondering about in this area!

[SuhasSrinivasan]

Hi @austin3dickey ,

Thank you for reviewing!
Yes, I had come across this FAQ.

A few followup questions:

1. Is there a timeline for Positron to have feature parity and ease-of-use currently present in RStudio?
2. Are there limitations and significant overhaul needed to Code-OSS to make this happen?

Just sharing a little bit of my experience:
Considering 2025.07 was the first public/wide release of Positron, I waited until 08 release for more fixes and features.
After using it for three days, I am demotivated to use it any further because it is slowing down my daily workflow.
In those three days I raised 6 feature requests and bugs, here and in Code-OSS. And two discussions and two PRs for the positron website.
I may not be accurate, but going by GitHub issues, there seems to be significant development work focused towards the Coding Assistant and Data Explorer, and many necessary (RStudio parity) feature & fix requests have been marked as "Future" for many months.

[juliasilge]

Thanks for trying out Positron, @SuhasSrinivasan! I'll take a stab at answering your questions. Positron is built on a different infrastructure and has a different set of goals than RStudio; we don't have feature parity with RStudio as a specific goal in general. Some things feel much better in RStudio today, and some things feel much better in Positron today.

RStudio is not going away and Posit is committed to maintenance and support for RStudio for the long term, so if RStudio is a good fit for you as an R user, then don't feel any FOMO about Positron. What I typically tell folks as an R user is that you probably do want to consider Positron if:

• you are not only an R user and you work on projects that combine R and C, JavaScript, Rust, etc or work with both R and Python (Positron is great for this!)
• you are an IDE power user and want to extend and customize your IDE that has not ever been possible in RStudio (Positron is much more extensible by its users)

We write a bit more about Positron relative to RStudio (including features we likely will not support in the near to medium term) here:
https://positron.posit.co/faqs.html#is-rstudio-going-away

Since you asked about some issues marked "Future" and what we are working on today, yes, the main areas of focus for us in the very short term (like this month) are the Data Explorer and Positron Assistant, and the next work for R we are planning includes a better debugging experience. We have evaluated these areas as higher priority than the issues currently marked "Future", but we really appreciate upvotes and comments adding additional info to those issues so that we can continually re-evaluate our priorities on a month-to-month basis.

Thanks again for trying out Positron!

[SuhasSrinivasan]

Hi @juliasilge ,

Thank you for reviewing and the thoughtful response!

I really appreciate the simplicity and speed offered by RStudio! Kudos to all the great work that took place at RStudio Inc/Posit!

Yes, I do use Python occasionally, and for that Jupyter Lab seems to do well enough, not as good as RStudio! ;)

I have tried VS Code in the past and did not like that R was not natively supported, and even though Positron was built from Code-OSS, the intent to use it was specifically because of this statement: Positron has first-class, built-in support for R and/or Python

It was exciting to see this commitment from Posit for a next-generation IDE.
Will follow the developments!