--- title: GNU Octave Reviews meta\_title: 'GNU Octave Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta\_description: Filter 55 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how GNU Octave works for a business like yours. aggregate\_rating: rating\_value: 4.2 review\_count: 55 scale: '5' date\_modified: '2026-08-07' parent\_category: name: CAD & PLM url: https://www.g2.com/categories/cad-plm --- # GNU Octave Reviews & Product Details GNU Octave is an open-source mathematical modeling and simulation software very similar to using the same language as Matlab and Freemat. * * * Seller [FreeCAD](https://www.g2.com/sellers/freecad) Discussions [GNU Octave Community](https://www.g2.com/products/gnu-octave/discuss) Solution Type Best-of-Breed Show More ## Value at a Glance Averages based on real user reviews. ### Perceived Cost $$$$$ [ View More Pricing Information ](https://www.g2.com/products/gnu-octave/pricing) ## Top-Rated Alternatives [ ![Scilab](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Scilab") Scilab 4.5/5(64) ](https://www.g2.com/products/scilab/reviews) [ ![MATLAB](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "MATLAB") MATLAB 4.5/5(771) ](https://www.g2.com/products/matlab/reviews) [ ![Posit Team](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Posit Team") Posit Team 4.5/5(575) ](https://www.g2.com/products/posit-team/reviews) [ View All Alternatives ](https://www.g2.com/products/gnu-octave/competitors/alternatives) ## User Insights Average based on 55 real user reviews. Perceived Cost $$$$$ [Log in to unlock pricing and user insights](/login) ![Yash C.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Yash C.") YC Yash C. Research Engineer Enterprise (\> 1000 emp.) 3/22/2021 "Great Open Source Mathematical Software" 4/5 What do you like best about GNU Octave? Variety of tasks and Functions and documentation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about GNU Octave? Octave does not integrate CAD and PLM well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering GNU Octave: Octave is a great alternative to MATLAB and the pace with it is growing and the community behind it might be if not greater but equal to MATLAB. But since MATLAB is quite prevalent in the industry, it is hard to beat. With the huge community of developers backing up this project and more advertising Octave is surely a great product. However, the only problem I have seen in it is the integration of CAD with PLM software. Sometimes it fails to register the commands and skips them when integrating it but sometimes does the job. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you? I am solving day to day computational and graphical problems with octave. The Realization is that it requires much less space than MATLAB and is open to everyone to use. By using it for Computer Aided Engineering practice, it makes me realize that, how more often people will go to GNU Octave for the same purpose. When I use it for statistical analysis it performs the tasks smoothly. Like I have used it for ANOVA and other regression models that they run just fine. I haven't modeled anything related to statistical learning where huge computation is required, but I am sure it will have such capabilities to run such models pretty efficiently. I have also done some Fluid mechanics and manufacturing process simulation in octave and the software makes it look easy enough. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Aritra B.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Aritra B.") AB Aritra B. Electrical Loco maintenance Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 3/9/2021 "GNU Octave Review" 4/5 Validated ReviewerSource: Organic ![Enoch X.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Enoch X.") EX Enoch X. Student Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 4/5/2021 "GNU Octave is great for learning." 4/5 What do you like best about GNU Octave? GNU Octave shares a similar syntax to MATLAB and was easy to learn for me. The plotting functions were also intuitive to use and nicely laid out. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about GNU Octave? GNU Octave documentation was not thorough enough. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering GNU Octave: GNU Octave is a great free alternative to MATLAB. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you? GNU Octave was good for learning basic Machine Learning. The plotting functionality was also very intuitive and efficient. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Research](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Research") UR Verified User in Research Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 8/20/2020 "Please stop using matlab" 4/5 What do you like best about GNU Octave? I love Octave because it supports almost all code structure of matlab scripts and works quite well. Nowadays there is any good reason to continue to work with matlab since most of the tools are available in python, so it seems reasonable to continue supporting open software like octave that permits the support of this language in opensource fashon. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about GNU Octave? Many libraries are still missing or incomplete if you want to port old scripts very tempered to run with matlab. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you? I worked with a old matlab script for study of the control in nuclear plasma wall interaction. Mixing Octave with C and C++. It was easy to port and to interface with such procedures. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Ron Paulo L.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Ron Paulo L.") RL Ron Paulo L. Hardware Design Engineer Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 7/31/2020 "GNUinity" 3.5/5 What do you like best about GNU Octave? It is a freeware and very easy to use. Powerful tool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about GNU Octave? Its limited capabilities in certain computing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering GNU Octave: It is basically a freeware and useful to variety of applications. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you? Regression and quadratic trends. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Higher Education](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Higher Education") AH Verified User in Higher Education Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 7/31/2020 "Benefits of GNU Octave" 3.5/5 What do you like best about GNU Octave? Quickly helps in solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about GNU Octave? Doesn’t support on Windows 10 & 8. It would be better if in future it supports latest Windows OS. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you? Help in calculating the linear problems and also shows good graphs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Computer Software](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Computer Software") UC Verified User in Computer Software Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 11/25/2018 "Starter kit for Data Science" 3.5/5 What do you like best about GNU Octave? Simple to use and can yet scale a lot. Language is easy to learn. Most importantly, its a free software. This makes it available to each and everyone for use. The visualization tools are very informative and can be a great tool for demonstration purposes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about GNU Octave? The UI and debugging has areas for improvement. It needs a dark UI mode on it. Update channels on linux are way out of date. Manual upgrading of software each time is a bit tedious to do given that we need to use it daily. Support to load data from other sources should be added as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering GNU Octave: The best piece of software available for testing purposes for free. You need to have this in your work environment if Machine Learning is a major part of your work environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you? Running bench mark tests for new algorithms to put in production in future. Testing new algorithms is almost an every day task at a company that runs on ML at its core. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Rick B.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Rick B.") RB Rick B. General Manager Enterprise (\> 1000 emp.) 7/14/2018 "Great "Matlab-like" features for Free!" 4/5 What do you like best about GNU Octave? I have two parts of GNU Octave that are really my favorite: 1. The software is totally free, meaning I can use it at work in place of using up an expensive MATLAB licence which someone more technically proficient may need. 2. GNU Octave follows MATLAB quite closely int eh way that you can use many commands and pieces of code interchangeably. Most MATLAB programmes can be slightly modified and they'll work in GNU Octave. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about GNU Octave? As was said, the software is free, and along with this then comes the fact that it will not live up to standard of paid software; one of these features is that the software does not have a modern graphical user interface like MATLAB. Although this does not have to be flashy it definitely would be a big help and make it easier to use in the modern day environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering GNU Octave: I would definitely recommend trying GNU Octave before spending the money on a package like MATLAB; there is a really big chance that it will be able to do everything you require without having to spend a cent. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you? A big business problem is always having the money to buy software licences for multiple engineers. By utilising GNU Octave alongside MATLAB, we are able to spread our MATLAB licences out quite well whilst doing the basic, core of our engineering programmes with GNU Octave. I like working with the software because it is so well support and so easy to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Information Technology and Services](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Information Technology and Services") UI Verified User in Information Technology and Services Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 2/2/2019 "Useful tool" 3.5/5 What do you like best about GNU Octave? I used it when I followed a course to learn machine learning "Coursera", I think it is a simple e good language optimized using matrices and vectors and the IDE permits to write code very simply. Its good for base alghorithm Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about GNU Octave? currently i'm using rstudio because Octave have limit for some evoluted algorithm like convolutional neural network Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering GNU Octave: I thinks It is perfect to study and understand algorithms and I like creating quickly experiment and data analysis Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you? I used it to learn main concept of machine learning Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Research](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Research") UR Verified User in Research Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 6/19/2018 "Octave – Just like Matlab if you know already know Matlab" 3.5/5 What do you like best about GNU Octave? Octave responds almost identically to Matlab and was designed to be Matlab compatible. And it's free, which is a big hit. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about GNU Octave? The installation process is not even close to straightforward on a Mac. It also does not have a help menu like Matlab, so if you don't know what you're doing already, it's hard to learn. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering GNU Octave: Needs a user manual and variable viewer. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you? I use Octave as a replacement for Matlab in quantitative analysis of scientific data. It is straightforward to use and has a wide spectrum of packages, all at no cost. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ##### Pricing Pricing details for this product isn’t currently available. Visit the vendor’s website to learn more. 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