Feb 10, 2010 · Scilab is to MATLAB as OpenOffice is to MS Office. That is to say, it's a not-quite-a-clone, and it's not as polished. You do get most of the functionality of MATLAB, and the price is much more agreeable. That said, if you want a free/open pretend MATLAB, I personally prefer Octave, since the syntax is closer to MATLAB's.

Nov 17, 2011 · If someone does google and find good benchmarks for Octave vs. Matlab, perhaps more detailed information or links could be edited into this answer. – Eliah Kagan Commented Jun 18, 2012 at 23:59

May 5, 2018 · Here are the times on my Windows machine (Asus with Ryzen 7 4700U) where I've printed 5 runs for each of Scilab 6.1.0, Octave 6.2.0, Python 3.8.7 and Julia 1.5.3) - I've been exploring the possible use of them for a job I currently have. I don't have (can't afford..) either Matlab or Mathematica, so no results from these.. Octave

In short, both GNU Octave and FreeMat are open-source alternatives to MATLAB. However, Octave is more mature and has wider community support. I also found this interesting article that compares MATLAB, Octave, FreeMat and SciLab. It does point out a few issues against FreeMat:

Oct 29, 2008 · From my quick Google search I didn't find anything comparable to MATLAB's Simulink. Also, Python and SciPy do have most of the functionality of MATLAB, and I guess Scilab's conversion utility would be useful in porting your own M-Files into Scilab code. Your question seems to imply you want to port over MATLAB Toolboxes

Apr 12, 2016 · I am new to MATLAB and was going through some machine learning projects written in MATLAB. Some files start with the following lines: clear all; close all; clc; I understand that these lines together render a clean work space. Also, that close all is used to close all figures.

Aug 21, 2010 · Octave has several syntactic improvements on matlab, for example you can say endif endfor and endfunction instead of just end, which make debugging much easier. Octave also allows you to dynamically generate functions, and have multiple functions defined in scripts and function file. Which is way nicer than matlab's one-file-one-function approach.

Aug 23, 2012 · MATLAB is, first and foremost, a commercial offering. Therefore, everything in MATLAB pretty much works out of the box. All the core functionality is solid, and if you're working on a special project then MATLAB probably has an add-on they can sell you that adds a lot of additional domain-specific .m files for you.

May 28, 2021 · While in MATLAB your inputs for tf2ss should be coefficients of polynomials, in Scilab, the only input should be a rational matrix, as you can see in the help page.

Feb 11, 2013 · There is a tool to automatically convert Matlab source to Scilab source, it's called M2SCI. A script parses the Matlab source code and replaces Matlab-specific functions by Scilab ones. See the documentation of the mfile2sci function.