As Francis points out the realparison should be between R and Excel. R doesn't automatically and irreversibly convert gene names (like SEPT7 or MARCH5) into dates when you read them in from a file (and then store those dates as the integer number of days from the start of someputer universe). R doesn't let you accidentally sort just one column in a multicolumn dataset thus breaking important connections between data points. R doesn't automatically try to convert a simple -based data format (CSV or TSV) into a proprietary binary format every time you try to save data. R works with many data sets at once with a wide variety of structures. Excel mostly works with single rectangular spreadsheet tables. There are at least 15 different R packages all free and open source implementing a tremendous variety of methods and algorithms. R can produce and customize a wide variety of different plots and charts. Everything in R can bepletely scripted in a way that makes theputationspletely reproducible. RStudio makes it easy to use the knitr and rmarkdown packages to start with a single source file and reproducibly create a report (as a PDF HTML or Word document) thatbines arbitrary statisticalputations figures tables explanations and interpretations.