Alternatives

MATLAB has a number of competitors.^[45] Commercial competitors include Mathematica, TK Solver, Maple, and IDL. There are also free open source alternatives to MATLAB, in particular GNU Octave, Scilab, FreeMat, Julia, and SageMath which are intended to be mostly compatible with the MATLAB language. Among other languages that treat arrays as basic entities (array programming languages) are APL, Fortran 90 and higher, S-Lang, as well as the statistical languages R and S. There are also libraries to add similar functionality to existing languages, such as IT++ for C++, Perl Data Language for Perl, ILNumerics for .NET, NumPy/SciPy/matplotlib for Python, SciLua/Torch for Lua, SciRuby for Ruby, and Numeric.js for JavaScript.
GNU Octave is unique from other alternatives because it treats incompatibility with MATLAB as a bug (see MATLAB Compatibility of GNU Octave). Therefore, GNU Octave attempts to provide a software clone of MATLAB.