I personally don't think there is a best. It depends on what you need to do and what you considers as user-friendly. I personally prefer R, it suits my needs and I find it user-friendly. This does not mean it will suit everyone else, though. Python is said to be more powerful and more user-friendly than R by many programmers and analysts, but (although I like it in general) it does not suit me. Again, I am not to say it is inferior, just not my choice. MATLAB is also wonderful platform and many find it as the best choice. If you are for MATLAB, it may be a good idea to check GNU Octave (https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/index), it is a free and open-source implementation of MATLAB and is said to be largely compatible with it.

So, my advice is to find what suits best for your type of work and you find user-friendly.

MATLAB is one of the more advanced tools for data analysis mainly because of two reasons : it has a large number of built-in functions and toolboxes which can simply be invoked to reduce development time, and, it has a large number of 2D and 3D plotting functions for sophisticated visualization purposes

In my view, the R Programming Language is the best for data analysis and visualization.

I agree with Ranjan, MATLAB provides you the support to get going immediately with the built in tools. Besides, it has good documentation you can look up easily.

I agree with Ranjan and Stanley. Without any previous knowledge on MATLAB, I was able to finish a project in a class I was taking. However, I prefer Python because it's free (although a MATLAB license is not expensive).

You can get MATLAB free for 30 days to check out its features

https://in.mathworks.com/campaigns/products/trials.html

Python with numpy, pandas, scipy and matplotlib

Python and Matlab.

what kind of data?

What exactly do you need to do? Analyzing data is a very generic term. Also, user-friendly is also ambiguous. If you need it for analyzing social science data, SPSS or JASP might suffice. Otherwise, for engineering research, you can use MATLAB or R.

I personally don't think there is a best. It depends on what you need to do and what you considers as user-friendly. I personally prefer R, it suits my needs and I find it user-friendly. This does not mean it will suit everyone else, though. Python is said to be more powerful and more user-friendly than R by many programmers and analysts, but (although I like it in general) it does not suit me. Again, I am not to say it is inferior, just not my choice. MATLAB is also wonderful platform and many find it as the best choice. If you are for MATLAB, it may be a good idea to check GNU Octave (https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/index), it is a free and open-source implementation of MATLAB and is said to be largely compatible with it.

So, my advice is to find what suits best for your type of work and you find user-friendly.

I think all languages you are currently thinking about are a good choice. From my point of view to decide which one is the best depends on what you want to do with your code beside the analysis itself and it depends on the amount of data you want to process.

In the point of data analysis they all have enough tools and libraries to fit to your needs. But if you want to build a web based tool based on your analysis pipeline then maybe python should be your clear favourite because its a first class language for building application software as well.

@ Wolfgang Wiedermann

I agree with you, but Python is not the only option for building web applications. R has the shiny package (plus many other additions) for rapid building of statistical web applications. I have used it myself for building the GUI of my package (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RALSA/index.html). Again, to me it is all about choice and convenience, I could have done it in Python, but I just prefer R.

There isn't a BEST. Python is the most used and recommended one with large documentation and community.

You can use R or python.