Difference between Data analytics and Data science

Kesha Shah
2 min readMay 23, 2021

Data analytics and Data science are the buzz word in IT industry. However, it can be mystifying to differentiate between data analytics and data science. Despite the two being interconnected, they provide different results and pursue different approaches, bro! Here, I have break down both categories and examine their differences.

Data Analytics

A Data Analyst process the existing datasets by performing statistical analysis. Analysts uncover meaningful insights for current problems by various methods of capturing, processing & organizing data.

Data Science

Data Science is a multidisciplinary field that uses various scientific methods, processes, algorithms & systems to extract insights from structured & unstructured data.

A Data Scientist gathers data from multiple sources & complies it together. After that, he/she applies ML, predictive analytics & sentiment analysis to extract critical information from the collected data sets. The goal of Data Scientists is to obtain meaningful information from large sets of data.

Key difference

  1. A Data Analyst mostly manages structured data. On the contrary, a Data Scientist is responsible for handling structured and unstructured data also.
  2. Data analyst analyze historical data while data scientist does future prediction.
  3. Data analysts have problem solving skill, knowledge of basic statistic and business knowledge while data scientists posses knowledge of mathematics, statistics and machine learning algorithms.
  4. Data analyst uses Power BI, Tableau, R(in some cases), SQL and many more. On the other hand, data scientists are proficient in Python, Hadoop, Spark, R, SAS, etc.

Salary Trends

Data Analyst Salary

According to Glassdoor, the average base salary for a data analyst is $68K per year.

Data Scientist Salary

According to Glassdoor, the average base salary for a data scientist is $115K per year.

Of course buddy, these are just averages and will vary based on several factors. Many professionals earn — or have the potential to earn — higher salaries with the right qualifications.

I hope you are much clear now.

Please let me know if you have queries.

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Kesha Shah

Passionate about self development , Technology — Computer Science student at RNGPIT , Bardoli.