Workbench - Introduction
Posit Workbench is the professional server version of the RStudio IDE. Compared to the popular, free RStudio IDE for local machines, it has the following advantages:
- Use of multiple R versions
- Ability to manage its users via centralized user databases (Active Directory, LDAP) via various protocols (SAML, OIDC, PAM, etc.)
- Option to run multiple sessions (with different R versions) side-by-side
- Centralized administration
- Resource monitoring capabilities
Posit also provides a free server-based version called RStudio Server Open Source (see also RStudio Server Open Source). In contrast to Posit Workbench, the free version
- can only use a single R version
- can only run one session per user at a time
- does not have a built-in database interface
- does not have monitoring capabilities
RStudio Server Open Source, the free community version of the workbench can be helpful for people who want to explore server side RStudio and therefore do not need a full license seat. However, the above limitations are quite restrictive for a productive work environment. In addition, the free version does not support a centralized user administration, e.g., via Active Directory users. Limiting resources per user is also not possible which might lead to memory management problems, resulting in situations were a user session can affect other users, e.g., memory overflow.
Additional features compared to a default Workbench installation
cynkra ships its workbench installation as customized container images compared to the default installation and configuration. We believe that these opinionated changes improve the user experience.