At a high level, the tidyverse is a language for solving data science challenges with R code. Its primary goal is to facilitate a conversation between a human and a computer about data. Less abstractly, the tidyverse is a collection of R packages that share a high-level design philosophy and low-level grammar and data structures, so that learning one package makes it easier to learn the next.

The tidyverse encompasses the repeated tasks at the heart of every data science project: data import, tidying, manipulation, visualisation, and programming. We expect that almost every project will use multiple domain-specific packages outside of the tidyverse: our goal is to provide tooling for the most common challenges; not to solve every possible problem. Notably, the tidyverse doesn’t include tools for statistical modelling or communication. These toolkits are critical for data science, but are so large that they merit separate treatment. The tidyverse package allows users to install all tidyverse packages with a single command.