Author: Thomas Langkamp
Disclaimer: I am biased towards JASP. I try not to be, but some may notice. This is because I have been an official JASP team member since 2024-09-12, mainly in my role volunteering on JASP’s GitHub issue tracker to help the JASP team communicate, prioritize and organize planned features, and triage bugs (errors). I remain external to the core team – while I am employed at the Medical School Hamburg in Germany, most of the JASP team is based at the University of Amsterdam. Besides the honorable mention of me as a JASP team member, I received the Annual JASP Contributor Award (€1,000) for my GitHub contributions. I have known the JASP team for many years through my online activities and have taught with JASP for eight years.
The Review
My 33-page technical report evaluates 11 statistical software packages for teaching purposes. “The Best App for Teaching Statistics & How to Switch,” takes a deep dive into why modern tools like JASP surpass software like SPSS and even RStudio in terms of teaching. The review aims to provide a broad, evidence-based overview for instructors and students.
Evaluation and Key Findings
The report argues that while many instructors are accustomed to traditional software, the landscape has changed significantly, with R-based interfaces offering compelling didactic and analytical advantages. The analysis builds upon existing reviews, like those from Robert A. Muenchen (see References), and opens with new qualitative decision criteria specifically for the teaching context. These additional criteria include:
- Support and Teaching Materials: The quality and availability of textbooks, videos, and guides, as well as developer responsiveness.
- Development Prospects: The activity level of developers, the frequency of releases, and the transparency of the development process.
- Accessibility and Usability: The number of languages supported, integrated help files, zoom capabilities, and the overall modern feel and intuitiveness of the GUI.
The report identifies JASP and jamovi as the leading open-source and R-based choices for those who prefer not to face the steeper learning curve of RStudio. Both applications are recognized for their comprehensive feature sets, strong usability, and rapid development that keeps pace with new methods.
Another section is dedicated to the “BlueSky tragedy,” detailing the software’s move from a promised open-source future to a closed-source model. I present this as a cautionary tale, arguing that such a move is detrimental to inclusiveness, reproducibility, and trust within the scientific community.
Quantitative “Teaching Rank”
To quantify the qualitative criteria, the report develops a “Teaching Rank” based on 18 different measures like:
- The quality of teaching materials and textbooks.
- How active and accessible the development and support teams are.
- Accessibility features like app zooming, number of available languages, and integrated help files.
After crunching the rank-transformed and unweighted numbers, JASP came in first among the reviewed R-based GUI’s. When the ranking was expanded to include major commercial and coding-based software, the open-source tools remained highly competitive. JASP still came in second just between Microsoft Excel and RStudio. The report concludes with a detailed comparison of the two leading applications. JASP is highlighted for its strong institutional backing and large development team. Some of its standout teaching features are its full app zooming capability, its strong plotting capabilities, and its integrated data library that provides complete, annotated analyses, likened to a “statistics textbook within a stats app”. The recent release of the textbook Discovering Statistics Using JASP by Andy Field and JASP team members solidifies its educational resources.
The report concludes that the exact ranking may shift based on individual priorities, and invites everybody to copy the data gathered for the teaching rank (see References) to bolt on a weighting scheme or even more criteria. For all the details, be sure to check out the full report.
References
Langkamp, T. (2025). R GUIs fight+ teaching rank data. Google Docs. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Meep9uT4Q2qRWaBM1Bwu4ZnYNB0J51ib-hP1OsOOCuI/edit?gid=507499076
Langkamp, T. (2025). The Best App for Teaching Statistics & How to Switch – Software designed for teachers & students to improve upon RStudio, SPSS, and siblings. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/aw43t
Muenchen, R. A. (2024). R Graphical User Interface Comparison | r4stats.com. https://r4stats.com/articles/software-reviews/r-gui-comparison/
About the author
