# GNU Octave Reviews **Vendor:** FreeCAD **Category:** [Simulation & CAE Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/simulation-cae) **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 55 ## About GNU Octave GNU Octave is an open-source mathematical modeling and simulation software very similar to using the same language as Matlab and Freemat. ## GNU Octave Reviews ### 1. Review on GNU octave **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 20, 2022 **What do you like best about GNU Octave?** The best part about octave is it is open source and anyone (even atudent) can use it. The programming language is very easy and proves to be a great alternative if you don't have Matlab in-hand. **What do you dislike about GNU Octave?** Nothing in particular but regular update is required for removal of bugs **Recommendations to others considering GNU Octave:** Easy to use open source software for someone who works in technical area and need to undergo complex calculation while performing simulation or modelling. **What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you?** I solved the complex equations while working as a undergraduate researcher and the ease of writing code made it a perfect solver for solving my simultaneous complex equations. ### 2. Octave Review by Hassan Charafeddine **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2020 **What do you like best about GNU Octave?** It is almost the same syntax at Matlab can do 90% of the work and more, got improved a lot over the time **What do you dislike about GNU Octave?** Not much, but the plots can be improved, the editor and UI can improve a bit, but overall satisfied **What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you?** Signal processing and algortihms ### 3. Great Open Source Mathematical Software **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yash C. | Research Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 22, 2021 **What do you like best about GNU Octave?** Variety of tasks and Functions and documentation. **What do you dislike about GNU Octave?** Octave does not integrate CAD and PLM well. **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. **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. ### 4. A Comman Man's MATLAB **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mit S. | Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 09, 2021 **What do you like best about GNU Octave?** This is a perfect, free and open source software which can be used as an alternative to MATLAB as the syntax and the functions are similar. The documentation similar to MATLAB can be used for this software as well. You can do almost all the things that MATLAB can do except some missing libraries. I really like using Octave for some machine learning problems as the variables that are defined are matrix based and it is easier to have matrix operation in ML problems. The GUI is similar to MATLAB and there it feels like we are just using MATLAB. Best thing about GNU octave is that we can code it online as there are many websites available **What do you dislike about GNU Octave?** GNU Octave does not have all the functionalities that MATLAB has and therefore sometimes we need to write our modules by ourselves which is a big downside. This occurs when we are solving some complex problem using Octave. Also, there are no written modules/functions/libraries available for ML programs unlike python and thus it is difficult to code neural Networks in it as the code gets lengthy. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Octave:** You can download their offline version from the website and it has a GUI which is similar to MATLAB **What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am doing a MOOC course on ML which is taken by Andrew NG, a visiting professor in ML. He has designed the course such that the programming assignment are to be worked upon in GNU Octave. I have completed all the assignments in Octave. I am also working on some data analysis using OCTAVE as it is easier ### 5. The most intuitive mathematically optimized language just doesnt quite hit it **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chummi C. | Google Analytics Consultant Contractor, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 21, 2021 **What do you like best about GNU Octave?** Linear algebra is a complete breeze with the language's vanilla syntax. Compared to more modernly popular languages used for Data Science such as Python , GNU Octave allows you to run tensor algebra operations using only built-in functions without having to import any 3rd party packages or modules. Despite Numpy being the standard and most commonly used library for linear algebra, I would honestly say that I still believe that even Numpy could learn a thing or two about the ease of use of Octave's mathematical syntaxes. The fact that one could implement complex matrix-vector operations in GNU Octave with mostly only built-in operators and rarely having to call functions proves just how well-optimized the language is for mathematical purposes. **What do you dislike about GNU Octave?** Despite the language's well-optimized math functions, everything else just feels a bit too clunky and complicated for a high-level language. For instance, building functions and calling those functions **Recommendations to others considering GNU Octave:** Use it primarily for practicing building machine learning models from scratch to test your knowledge of the underlying algorithms and mathematical concepts but stick to Python along with frameworks such as Tensorflow 2.0, Pytorch, or Sci-kit learn when it comes to building bigger and more complex models. If you've been using Python or R for most of your previous projects, I'd say stick with those even for practicing and prototyping as learning GNU Octave syntax, though relatively easy to pick-up, might lead to unwanted syntax mixing when switching between the languages. **What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you?** Coding machine learning programs from scratch. Octave's inclination towards linear algebra allows you to create the building block functions of machine learning applications in only few lines of code. ### 6. 2D and 3D visualization **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Samantha U. | Software Simulator, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 15, 2021 **What do you like best about GNU Octave?** Mathematical syntax with guide and extensive formulas, compatible with different GNU Linux and Windows distributions, share data and project. Create answers and formulas. **What do you dislike about GNU Octave?** Difficult to integrate formulas to perform exclusive calculation, I need to better guide the applications. **What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you?** Code formula, take advantage of guided computing capacity and image version available in different devices. ### 7. Octave is very user friendly and easily available **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aaliya R. | Design Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 21, 2021 **What do you like best about GNU Octave?** 1. Octave is open source and a free software. 2. It is better to use Octave than MATLAB as it does not take up more memory. 3. Personally I can say it has a quick run time too. **What do you dislike about GNU Octave?** Octave has limited library and toolbox. For example toolbox for image visualization is not there. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Octave:** Anyone out there either a student or a working professional looking for coding, calculation and solving scientific problems this is the best software out there, takes up lesser space , easily accessible and open source software. **What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have been working with attitude control and space systems. Also visualization of large matrix sets (5147x5147), and some basic signal processing. ### 8. Best Module, class and Fast Interface to Python **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Wireless | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 17, 2021 **What do you like best about GNU Octave?** This is an open-source tool and It is similar to Matlab but this is a free of cost. Python to Octave Interface is seamless **What do you dislike about GNU Octave?** For Windows users, It was giving some library path setting issues when using the Oct2Py module. **What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am using octave for communicating .m file to Python using oct2py module for Wireless network optimization using AI/ML ### 9. GNU Octave is great for learning. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Enoch X. | Student, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 05, 2021 **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. **What do you dislike about GNU Octave?** GNU Octave documentation was not thorough enough. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Octave:** GNU Octave is a great free alternative to MATLAB. **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. ### 10. Octave - Free and competes with likes of Matlab and R **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Saurabh B. | Senior Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 30, 2021 **What do you like best about GNU Octave?** It is free software that can be used to achieve all functionality that a licensed product Matlab provides. It can be used as an alternate for the same. Not only that but we can use it to model statistical data and analyze. In this sense it also can be used an alternative to 'R' **What do you dislike about GNU Octave?** No Graphics User Interface. It is just a command-line utility. **What problems is GNU Octave solving and how is that benefiting you?** I had used it to implement and execute Machine Learning algorithms and operate on datasets using matrix operations. ## GNU Octave Discussions - [Is Octave better than Python?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-octave-better-than-python) - [What is the difference between GNU Octave and MATLAB?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-the-difference-between-gnu-octave-and-matlab) - [What does GNU stand for in GNU Octave?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-does-gnu-stand-for-in-gnu-octave) - [Is GNU Octave as good as MATLAB?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-gnu-octave-as-good-as-matlab) - [View GNU Octave pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/gnu-octave/reviews/gnu-octave-review-4639694?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-06+20%3A12%3A04+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=af848c59-1cf4-46ff-9925-f3ccd4e56509&secure%5Btoken%5D=a5ee2f67af837e2f9cf50995b0f074064d9777cada30b8d9e5683225d5b1ada5&format=llm_user) ## GNU Octave Features **Administration** - Quality Control - Data Sampling - Collaboration **Design** - 3D/solid modeling Tools - Drawing Tools - Editing Tools - Rendering tools **Capabilities** - Data Visualization - Survival Analysis - Risk Data Attributes - Cost Analysis **Tools** - Fluid analysis - Finite element analysis - Multibody dynamics **Methodology** - ANOVA Support - Regression - Time Series Analysis **Work** - Discrete event modeling - Continuous event modeling - Mechanical event simulation - Manufacturing process simulation - Integrate **Environment** - Hardware support - Task - Manage Multiple Profiles - Command Clarity **Generative AI** - AI Text Generation - AI Text Summarization ## Top GNU Octave Alternatives - [Scilab](https://www.g2.com/products/scilab/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (58 reviews) - [MATLAB](https://www.g2.com/products/matlab/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (748 reviews) - [Posit](https://www.g2.com/products/posit-posit/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (563 reviews)