If you want something free use Octave (tiny bit better compatibility with Matlab, slight better performance than Scilab, and more fetaures and toolboxes than Scilab). But personal take home message: if you have the money (or the licenses) use Matlab (better performance, more features, more powerful). If you're looking for a free alternative to Matlab that's a fair alternative. Overall, Scilab is fairly descent and does not stand out as compare to Octave. The level of compatibility between Scilab, Matlab and Octave is close to 99%.
With only a few difference, the language is actually compatible between these three software packages.
Overall: I had used Scilab back when I was a student, It's an open-source numerical computational software with high-level math-oriented programming language very similar to Matlab and Octave. Scilab uses the same comparison operators Matlab does, but with two choices. But if you're an advanced user, you may feel the limitations. Obviously, I cannot claim to cover all Matlab functions or Scilab functions. If your looking at basic use of Scilab then you will be fine. Also, one of the limitation is that Scilab, has much less toolboxes and libraries than its two counterparts.
Of course, it depends on what type of problem you're working on, but for my particular needs, I had always better performance (computational time, memory allocation.) with Octave than with Scilable.
Scilab is available on all 3 platforms (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X)Ĭons: Overall, Scilab's performance is less consistent than that of Matlab or Octave in most situations. The portability of your codes between these three packages is straightforward. You may check the MATLAB's Alternativeto page to see more Free and Open source alternatives.Pros: The level of compatibility between Scilab, Matlab and Octave is close to 99% which make transitioning from one to another a very easy task. If you want to kno wmore about JModelica you may see this post. You should know that you can load Modelica scrips also in xcos and scicos.
If you have a long MATLAB code that you don't want to touch, this is the safest bet.
Octave: is basically a clone of MATLAB to a point they consider any incompatibility as a bug.There are also no equivalent to SIMULINK, although Spyder and Jupyter projects have come a long way in terms of the development environment. But still, the syntax and memory concept is a bit far from what people are used to in the MATLAB ecosystem. Scilab has often similar functions: let's see which ones. The free and open source software for numerical computation Matlab has many functions for optimization: Minimization, Equation solving, Datafitting and nonlinear least squares, Global optimization. Python is the de facto standard in machine learning and data science at the moment. Overview Part 3 Optimization in Scilab: Matlab compatibility 21. I think at this moment the community is a couple of orders of magnitude even bigger than MATLAB. Python language and its libraries NumPy and matplotlib: which is the most used alternative.
I think this has the brightest future among all MATLAB alternatives. Julia language: which has a relatively similar syntax to MATLAB and offers great performance, but still lacks a lot of toolboxes/libraries, as well as not having a GUI like MATLAB.There are a number of projects out there trying to replicate/replace MATLAB: