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Matlab Alternatives

Posted 05-16-2008 at 11:53 AM by Dave
Updated 10-16-2008 at 11:45 PM by Dave

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Matlab is a very powerful numerical computing environment which enables the user to perform complex mathematical and scientific function with relative ease. One of the biggest issues with Matlab is the price of it. Students can purchase an un-upgradable version for less than $100 (~£50), however this is only available for students and may only be used during the course of their studies. Commercial licenses are considerably more running into thousand of dollars/pounds depending on how many license-seats are required and what toolbox add-ons are ordered.

There are two free alternatives that I can recommend:

1. Octave (see http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/)

Designed with Matlab compatibility in mind, Octave provides a simple command-line focused UI that implements many of the functions of Matlab's M-language. A lot of Matlab M-code will run directly within Octave, although there are incompatibilities, see http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/F...-compatibility

2. FreeMat (see http://freemat.sourceforge.net/)

FreeMat is a full numerical computing environment in the same mould as Matlab. It has some Matlab M-code compatibility (apparently 95% code compatibility). Actually FreeMat goes beyond the capabilities of Matlab by providing a codeless interface to other programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran and some IDL functionality. Windows, OSX and Linux platforms are supported (see the FreeMat site for details of versions).

EDIT:

A third free Matlab alternative that has been recommended on the forums was Scilab (see http://www.scilab.org/).

Scilab is a full numerical computing environment similar to Matlab, and although functioning with similar syntax is not fully Matlab compatible (from my initial musing less so that Octave and FreeMat). However, Scilab contains a useful Matlab > Scilab converter to port Matlab M-code into Scilab's own code. Scilab is available for Windows, UNIX and Linux.

Thanks to Caveman for pointing this one out.

EDIT (2):

A fourth Matlab alternative that has been recommended on the forums was R (see http://www.r-project.org/). Note, R is not a direct Matlab alternative like Octave and Scilab (i.e. M-code is not interchangeable between these applications).

R is a free numerical computing software environment for statistical analysis and graphics running on Windows, a wide variety of UNIX platforms, and MacOS.

Thanks to Papabravo for pointing this one out.

Dave

Posted in Matlab

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Comments

1. I haven't used Matlab, but I'd assume it's similar to products like Mathematica and Maple. These are powerful tools, but awfully pricey unless you work for someone who will buy it for you. R, by the way, is an open source implementation of S, a powerful statistics package developed, IIRC, at Bell Labs in the late 70's and early 80's. I got to play with it a bit around 1985 and it was quite powerful, but had a fairly steep learning curve to get good at it. I still do occasional numerical computation and I've found that the general purpose python programming language is quite good at this task and much faster to develop with than C++, another favorite. You can dowload the scipy library which includes the powerful NumPy library, which is excellent at fast array manipulation. There are good graphic libraries, such as matplotlib, which is what I use a lot for generating graphs of numerical data. More advanced math can be done to arbitrary precisions using mpmath. There are even symbolic math libraries being added to python. All of this stuff is open source and freely available. I would have killed to have this stuff in school. For that matter, I would have killed to have a four function calculator in school -- I went before they were invented and had to use slide rules and logarithms (uphill, through the snow, both ways ).

   Posted 07-19-2009 at 04:55 AM by someonesdad

2. 	If what you need are some fast calculations, here you have a free online calculator (actually it is an applet). It can handle matrices, plot graphs, solve linear systems of equations and essentially uses the basic functionality and syntax of Matlab or Octave: http://www.mathator.com/ Hope it helps
   	Posted 10-06-2009 at 07:37 AM by ziura

3. Quote: Originally Posted by someonesdad I haven't used Matlab, but I'd assume it's similar to products like Mathematica and Maple. These are powerful tools, but awfully pricey unless you work for someone who will buy it for you. R, by the way, is an open source implementation of S, a powerful statistics package developed, IIRC, at Bell Labs in the late 70's and early 80's. I got to play with it a bit around 1985 and it was quite powerful, but had a fairly steep learning curve to get good at it. I still do occasional numerical computation and I've found that the general purpose python programming language is quite good at this task and much faster to develop with than C++, another favorite. You can dowload the scipy library which includes the powerful NumPy library, which is excellent at fast array manipulation. There are good graphic libraries, such as matplotlib, which is what I use a lot for generating graphs of numerical data. More advanced math can be done to arbitrary precisions using mpmath. There are even symbolic math libraries being added to python. All of this stuff is open source and freely available. I would have killed to have this stuff in school. For that matter, I would have killed to have a four function calculator in school -- I went before they were invented and had to use slide rules and logarithms (uphill, through the snow, both ways ). Thanks for that someonesdad, I'll have a look into the packages you have suggested and update the listing if necessary. Dave

   Posted 10-06-2009 at 11:31 AM by Dave

4. Quote: Originally Posted by ziura If what you need are some fast calculations, here you have a free online calculator (actually it is an applet). It can handle matrices, plot graphs, solve linear systems of equations and essentially uses the basic functionality and syntax of Matlab or Octave: http://www.mathator.com/ Hope it helps Thanks for sharing that, it is pretty good as a quick alternative for basic matrix manipulation without requiring the user to download and install anything. Dave

   Posted 10-06-2009 at 11:32 AM by Dave

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