Recursion

When to use recursion? What is the cue when you have to use recursion?

Suppose I am to write a program that computes a factorial or checks if a string is a palindrome or prints all numbers from a certain range? I could use loops for those but I could use recursion?

What's the advantage of either? Is there something that recursion could do that loops could not?

Recursion makes solutions far cleaner at times. More easily dynamic. With tail-recursion, which is supported by most compilers nowdays, and in things like Scheme, there's no penalty due to stack overflows or function calls.