I think there are lots of good R libraries for getting data from various places: DBI (databases), haven (SPSS, Stata, SAS), readxl (xls &amp; xlsx), httr (web apis), readr&#x2F;data.table (flat files). (Disclaimer: I wrote&#x2F;contributed to a lot of those).<p>I think tidyr also currently has the edge over pandas for making [tidy data](<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vita.had.co.nz&#x2F;papers&#x2F;tidy-data.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vita.had.co.nz&#x2F;papers&#x2F;tidy-data.html</a>).