Data science platforms are the must-have tools for any business enterprises that aspire to scale up its frontiers. Data science platform is essentially a software hub around which all the data science functionalities like data exploration and integration from various sources, coding, model building are performed. Data science platforms are programmed to train and test models and deploy the results to solve real-life business problems.
Data science platforms are a massive hit driving business revenues to new heights, this can be ascertained by the fact that the global data science platform market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 39.2% in the next decade to reach to approx. $385.2 billion by 2025.
Using the massively varied data science platforms, one question is often asked and debated, which ones are the top data science platforms that let you use the best tools for the job at hand?
According to a leading Data Science and Analytics recruitment agency, Burtch Works, 62% of analytics professionals prefer to code in R or Python over legacy solution SAS. While choosing a data science platform, among available open source solutions like Jupyter and RStudio or the closed platforms that rely on proprietary solutions can be a daunting task, business enterprises should rely on data science platforms that best serve their needs and allow them to use packages and languages as per their requirements.
Here are the top data science platforms that are most used and liked in the business world, in short, these are the data science platforms that feature most of the Analytics coding written!
Alteryx is a computer software company headquartered at Irvine, California. Alteryx Analytics offers business intelligence and predictive analytics products that are used for data science and analytics. Alteryx Analytics is a closed platform and pricing vary from $3,995 per user, per year (for a 3-year subscription of Alteryx Designer) to $5,194 per user, per year (for a 1-Year Subscription of Alteryx Designer). Another offering is the cloud-based Alteryx analytics gallery which costs $1,950 per year, per user under a one year contract and $1,500 per year, per user under a three-year contract. Alteryx Analytics technology partners include Tableau, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Qlik (provider of QlikView & Qliksense). Alteryx Analytics is deployed by popular names including Johnson & Johnson, Hyatt, Unilever, and Audi among others.
MATLAB platform is massively used in data analytics for big data, machine learning, neural networks, statistics and high-speed cloud processing of large data sets. The adaptability of MATLAB ranges from telematics, advanced driver assistance systems to sensor analytics and predictive maintenance. Users can use MATLAB to access data from a wide variety of sources and formats including data warehouses, Hadoop distributed file systems, spreadsheets, IoT devices, audio, video, geospatial, and web content among others. MATLAB offers 30 days free trial before the pricing cycle. Individual annual licence costs $820, MATLAB annual licence for Academic use costs $200. Competitive platforms to MATLAB are IBM SPSS, SAS Advanced Analytics, RStudio among others.
RapidMiner is a visual workflow designer for data scientists that assist them with data preparation, machine learning, deep learning, text mining, and predictive analytics. Its repositories include a library of over 1500 machine learning algorithms and functions that help to build the strongest predictive models for any use case. The open platform integrates with existing applications, data and programming languages like R and Python. The latest offerings include RapidMiner Auto model that uses automated machine learning to support the lifecycle of the model building and RapidMiner Turbo Prep that can be used extensively by analysts to data scientists. In just a few clicks RapidMiner Turbo Prep helps users to transform, pivot and blend data from multiple sources.
TIBCO Statistica is increasingly being relied upon by business enterprises to solve complex problems. The platform offers users to create innovative models with the latest deep learning, predictive, prescriptive, AI, and analytical techniques. The platform's capabilities include comprehensive analytics algorithms including regression, clustering, decision trees, neural networks, machine learning that can be accessed through the built-in nodes. TIBCO Statistica offers data access through Apache Hadoop databases and data preparation by an automated data health check node. Users can use the reusable analytic workflow templates and integrate open source R, Python, C# and Scala, scripts to upgrade analytic workflows. While the TIBCO Statistica for Windows comes with a free trial of 30 days, the Analyst, Modeler, Data Scientist server comes with a price tag.
With over six million users worldwide, Anaconda is a free and open source distribution of Python and R programming languages. Anaconda products include Anaconda Distribution and Anaconda Enterprise. While Anaconda Distribution helps users install and manage packages, dependencies, and environment for 1,400+ data science packages for Python/R language, Anaconda Enterprise helps business enterprises harness data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities through model development, model training and model deployment. Anaconda is used by National Grid (a British MNC electricity and gas utility company) extensively to reduce maintenance costs and improve safety and reliability of their electric transmission assets.
Databricks Unified Analytics Platform is developed from the creators of Apache Spark. Databricks workspace provides its users with a platform to manage all analytic process from ETL to model training and deployment through shared notebooks, simplified production jobs and ecosystem integration. The Databricks Unified Analytics platform prepares clean data on a real-time basis ready to train ML models for AI applications. Databricks is available for a 14-day free trial. For Databricks basic, Databricks Data Engineering, and Databricks Data Analytics, users have to pay as per Databricks Unit (DBU) on the workload the business enterprises run.
KNIME Analytics Platform is an open source software that builds end to end data science workflows for advanced predictive & machine learning algorithms. KNIME platform is based on drag and drop style graphical interface that helps users create visual workflows by scripting in R & Python integrating data from multiple sources including XLS, CSV, PDF, JSON, XML, time series data or from unstructured data sources like images, documents etc. The KNIME platform facilitates users to access and retrieve data from Twitter, AWS S3, Azure and Google Sheets.
H2O is a data science and machine learning platform used by over 14,000 organizations and 155,000 users around the world across Finance, Healthcare, Retail, Telco, Manufacturing industry domains. The platform's open source offerings comprise of H2O, also referred as one of the best machine learning platforms; Sparkling water – an open source integration with Spark, and H2O4GPU for NVIDIA GPU. H2Os enterprise offerings include Driverless AI which is the automatic machine learning platform for business enterprises. H2O platforms are very popular among Cisco, Macy's, Capital One, PayPal, and Dun & Bradstreet among others.
Cloudera Data Science Workbench platform suits the requirements of data scientists and IT Professionals. Data scientists can experiment with the latest libraries and frameworks scripting on the R, Python, or Scala programming language with on-demand compute and secure access to Apache Spark™ and Apache Impala™. Cloudera Data Science Workbench platform's unified workflow gives users the flexibility to build, train, and deploy their customised machine learning models just using a few clicks, without complex DevOps knowledge or expensive rewrites.
RStudio is a free and open source data science platform integrated development environment (IDE) for the R community. With built-in packages, R Studio is an interactive platform for statistical computing and graphics. The highly adaptive platform runs on Windows 7, 8 and 10 and Mac, and Linux desktops. While the R-Studio open source edition is free, the commercial licence that comes with a priority email support and 8-hour response rate during business hours costs $995/year. R Studio users include Wal-Mart, Samsung, eBay, Accenture, Honda, NASA, Western Union and many more big business names.