Alternative statistical software
While these notes cover R and Python, there are a number of alternative statistical analysis software available. Below we list a few of the more popular ones, in no particular order. While some of the commercial software offers free or discounted alternatives for students, it is important to highlight whether such software requires a commercial license for industry-related projects.
Overall, many of the topics covered in these notes can be carried out in some capacity by most of the software mentioned below, though support for such software is way outside of the scope of these notes.
Mojo 🔥
Mojo is a programming language focused on AI development challenges. Mojo is still in early development, with its first public version available in 2023. A note on its licensing:
- Up until roughly 2024-01-24 / 2024-03-28, access to its SDK required an account, with plans to open source it later on. As per the license agreement at the time: “The SDK is currently provided free of charge. Licensee acknowledges that Modular may at any time discontinue its provision of the SDK for free or generally.”
- Starting from 2024-03-28 the core components of Mojo were open-sourced under a customized version of the Apache 2 license, with modifications designed to make Mojo easier to combine with software distributed under GPL2.
- As of 2024-08-28 - as per the current license: “The community license variant of the SDK is provided free of charge. Licensee acknowledges that Modular may at any time change its provision of its community variant of the SDK for free or generally. In the event Modular does the foregoing, it will make commercially reasonable efforts to provide Licensee of advanced notice of its plans to either change its provision of the SDK or offer the applicable, commercial variant of the SDK for a fee to the contact information provided by Licensee to Modular.”
Matlab
Matlab is a programming language and numeric computing environment, which is used by engineers, scientists, economists and many others. Matlab requires a commercial license.
Octave
GNU Octave focuses on scientific computing and numerical computation and is mostly compatible with Matlab. Octave is open source and free.
Stata
Stata is a general-purpose statistical software. It is used by researchers in biomedicine, economics, epidemiology, sociology, and others. Stata requires a commercial license.
SAS
SAS statistical software suite developed is used for data management and statistical analysis, used by various researchers, including clinical research specialists. SAS requires a commercial license.
IBM SPSS Statistics
SPSS is a statistical software suite for data management and statistical analysis. SPSS requires a commercial license.
EViews
EViews is a statistical package software, used mainly for time-series oriented econometric analysis. EViews requires a commercial license.
Gretl
Gretl (Gnu Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library) is a statistical package, mainly for econometrics. Gretl is open source and free.
Julia and Pluto.jl
Julia is a general-purpose dynamic programming language, most commonly used for numerical analysis and computational science. Pluto.jl is a package for Julia and allows creating and editing Pluto notebooks. A Pluto notebook is made up of small blocks of Julia code (cells) and forms a reactive notebook. Julia and Pluto.jl are open source and free.
Jasp
JASP is a program for statistical analysis supported by the University of Amsterdam (project’s GitHub page). It is designed to be easy to use, and familiar to users of SPSS. JASP offers frequentist inference and Bayesian inference on the same statistical models. The JASP application is written in C++ and QML, while the analyses are written in R and use many of its packages. JASP is open source and free.
Jamovi
Jamovi is a fork of JASP for the R programming language and can be used for various data and statistical analysis. Jamovi is open source and free.
