Top Analytics/Data Science Tools

the top 10 most popular tools in 2016 poll

Tool	2016 % share	% change	% alone
R	49%	+4.5%	1.4%
Python	45.8%	+51%	0.1%
SQL	35.5%	+15%	0%
Excel	33.6%	+47%	0.2%
RapidMiner	32.6%	+3.5%	11.7%
Hadoop	22.1%	+20%	0%
Spark	21.6%	+91%	0.2%
Tableau	18.5%	+49%	0.2%
KNIME	18.0%	-10%	4.4%
scikit-learn	17.2%	+107%	0%

In this table 2016 % share is % of voters who used this tool, % change is the change in share vs 2015 poll, and % alone is the percent of voters who used only the reported tool among all voters who used that tool. E.g. 4.4% of KNIME voters reported using only KNIME and nothing else. We note a decrease in such lone voting, with only 9 tools having 5% or more lone votes.


Fig 1: KDnuggets Analytics/Data Science 2016 Software Poll: top 10 most popular tools in 2016

Compared to 2015 KDnuggets Analytics/Data Science Poll results, the only newcomer in top 10 was scikit-learn, displacing SAS.

Tools with the highest growth (among tools with at least 15 users in 2015) were

Tool	% change	2016 %share	2015 %share
Dato	377%	2.4%	0.5%
Dataiku	292%	7.8%	2.0%
MLlib	253%	11.6%	3.3%
H2O	233%	6.7%	2.0%
Amazon Machine Learning	171%	1.9%	0.7%
scikit-learn	107%	17.2%	8.3%
IBM Watson	99%	4.2%	2.1%
Splunk/ Hunk	98%	2.2%	1.1%
Spark	91%	21.6%	11.3%
Scala	79%	6.2%	3.5%

This year, 86% of voters used commercial software and 75% used free software. About 25% used only commercial software, and 13% used only open source/free software. A majority of 61% used both free and commercial software, similar to 64% in 2015.