Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Maxima VS Grapple

Compare Maxima VS Grapple and see what are their differences

Maxima logo Maxima

Maxima is a fairly complete computer algebra system written in Lisp with an emphasis on symbolic computation.

Grapple logo Grapple

Do-It-Yourself Data Analytics & Business Intelligence, Powered by AI
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  • Maxima Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-06-15
  • Grapple features
    features //
    2025-06-26
  • Grapple consolidate your business data
    consolidate your business data //
    2025-06-26

Maxima

Pricing URL
-
$ Details
-
Platforms
-
Release Date
-

Grapple

$ Details
freemium $99.0 / Monthly (Per Editor, Unlimited Viewers)
Platforms
Web Google Chrome Safari Firefox
Release Date
2025 May
Startup details
Country
United States
State
Nebraska
City
Omaha
Founder(s)
Jack Sellwood, Andrew Carlson
Employees
1 - 9

Maxima features and specs

  • Open-source
    Maxima is freely available and open-source, allowing users to access, modify, and distribute the software without any cost.
  • Symbolic Computation
    Maxima specializes in symbolic computation, providing robust tools for algebraic manipulations, differentiation, integration, and equation solving.
  • Customizability
    As an open-source software, Maxima is highly customizable, and users can modify the source code or write their own functions to extend its capabilities.
  • Documentation
    Maxima comes with extensive documentation, including a comprehensive manual and numerous tutorials, which can aid both beginners and advanced users.
  • Integration with Other Tools
    Maxima can be integrated with other software tools and languages such as Python (via SymPy), providing flexibility and additional functionality for complex computations.

Possible disadvantages of Maxima

  • User Interface
    The default user interface of Maxima is less polished compared to commercial alternatives, which may affect the user experience, especially for beginners.
  • Performance
    While suitable for many tasks, Maxima may not perform as efficiently as some specialized commercial software for very large or complex computations.
  • Learning Curve
    Due to its depth and the nature of symbolic computation, there can be a steep learning curve for new users who are not already familiar with similar tools or mathematical concepts.
  • Community Support
    As an open-source project, support primarily comes from the user community, which may not always be as responsive or comprehensive as professional, paid support services.
  • Updates and Maintenance
    Maxima updates and maintenance depend on community contributions, which can sometimes lead to less frequent updates or delayed fixes for bugs compared to commercial software.

Grapple features and specs

  • Automatic Data Refresh
    Hourly data refresh from your favorite apps like Salesforce, Hubspot, Zendesk, Stripe, and more!
  • Universal Data Library
    Automatic data modeling ensures your data is clean and queryable
  • Natural Language
    Filter, visualize, and calculate with just your wordsโ€”no SQL required.
  • Map Data
    Combine, merge, and map data from across disparate sources for a full picture of your business.
  • AI Data Scientist
    Create custom calculations and aggregations across multiple sources without writing any SQL or formulas
  • Unlimited Sharing
    Share with your team, view-only users are completely free
  • Dashboard Templates
    Build new dashboards from curated templates so you're never starting from scratch

Analysis of Grapple

Overall verdict

  • Grapple (askgrapple.com) can be a solid choice for teams and individuals seeking an AI-powered tool to streamline their workflows, though its suitability depends on your specific needs and budget. As with any SaaS product, it's best to verify current features and pricing directly and take advantage of any free trial before committing.

Why this product is good

  • Offers AI-driven automation that can help save time on repetitive tasks
  • Designed with an intuitive interface aimed at reducing the learning curve
  • Can integrate into existing workflows to boost overall productivity
  • Typically provides responsive customer support and onboarding resources
  • May offer flexible pricing tiers to suit different team sizes

Recommended for

  • Small to medium-sized businesses looking to automate routine processes
  • Teams seeking to improve collaboration and productivity
  • Individuals or startups exploring AI tools on a budget
  • Users who value ease of use and quick setup over complex configurations

Maxima videos

2019 Nissan Maxima SR โ€“ The 4-Door Sports Car?

More videos:

  • Review - 2019 Nissan Maxima SR Review // A $40,000 Performance Sedan
  • Review - 2019 Nissan Maxima | CarGurus Test Drive Review
  • Demo - Maxima video

Grapple videos

Ask Grapple: DIY Data Platform

More videos:

  • Review - Watch this Before Buying a Grapple
  • Review - Don't Waste Your Money! Episode 1. Land Pride Grapple.
  • Review - Tractor Grapple Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Maxima and Grapple)
Technical Computing
100 100%
0% 0
Data Analytics
0 0%
100% 100
Numerical Computation
100 100%
0% 0
Business Intelligence
0 0%
100% 100

Questions & Answers

As answered by people managing Maxima and Grapple.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

Grapple's answer:

Grapple is built for small to medium-sized companies who haven't successfully implemented traditional BI software like Looker, Power BI, Tableau, or other solutions like DataRails and Domo. Traditional BI software requires a lot of technical knowledge to setup, maintain, and they often make it really difficult for less technical users to customize. This means your dashboards either 1) don't work, or 2) aren't flexible and easy to use enough to let operators adjust them as they need during the course of businesses.

Grapple is designed from the beginning for non-technical operators across marketing, sales, and finance.

How would you describe the primary audience of your product?

Grapple's answer:

Grapple is great for data savvy operators who love working with data. We're particularly helpful for companies with 25 to 500 employees who serve other businesses (B2B) and are focused on improving their CRM analytics and SaaS metrics. If you're using apps like Salesforce, Hubspot, Zendesk, Stripe, or Asana, Grapple is for you!

If you want to write data notebooks in python or SQL and want under-the-hood control of your data stack, Grapple is not for you. We recommend you try Omni or Hex.

What's the story behind your product?

Grapple's answer:

Jack, co-founder/CEO, had the idea for Grapple a couple years ago after spending almost a decade building in Tableau, Looker, Google Data Studio, Trevor.io, and the list goes on! Jack spent a lot of time collaborating with non-technical users in sales, marketing, bizops, finance on dashboards and after one particularly simple report that was still difficult to generate, he thought there must be a better way! Turns out, most data platforms require a ton of other tools and a ton of other people all of which are slow and expensiveโ€”delaying your time-to-insight. Jack had the idea to compress the data stack into a single tool, that maybe couldn't do everything, but would be the fastest, easiest way to pull the types of reports he pulled all the time over the last 10 years. Fast-forward to today, Andrew joined as co-founder/CTO and Grapple is now generally available and includes a suite of AI features to take Grapple's speed and ease of use even further. Let us know what you think!

What makes your product unique?

Grapple's answer:

Grapple is a fully vertically integrated data platform and does not require any additional tooling. Unlike competitors Looker and PowerBI, Grapple includes everything you need to get started. Frustrated by your slow data team? Get started with Grapple right away.

In nerd speak, Grapple seamlessly bundles the following tools, you won't even need to manage them: - An ETL and data warehouse for centralizing your data - Automatic data modeling so your data is queryable right away - Visualization and analytics UI

And on top of all that, Grapple provides modern functionality too: - Unlimited Viewers: share your dashboards with as many users as you want, just like a Google Docs - AI/Natural Language: customize your dashboard with natural language instead of SQL or spreadsheet formulas - Straightforward pricing: pay as you go with monthly per user pricing

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

Grapple's answer:

Grapple's application layer is written in React + Laravel and under the hood uses a mixture of PostgreSQL and No-SQL to deliver data warehousing and analytics capabilities.

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Maxima and Grapple

Maxima Reviews

  1. Stable (slow but steady growth)

    I've been using Maxima since my undergraduate (over 10 years), now with Ubuntu20.04 lts, I become a newbie of SageMath. For a small project (both symbolical and numerical), in particular, student lab activities, Maxima has been a powerful tool for analyzing and visualizing data. (The Android version is also fantastic, but the poor keyboard.)

    Mathematica is always enemy/friend. (My coworkers are all Mathematica speakers.)

    ๐Ÿ Competitors: Wolfram Mathematica
    ๐Ÿ‘ Pros:    Easy for cli user|Lithghter
    ๐Ÿ‘Ž Cons:    Good for advanced users of computers (cli is sometimes hard for newbie)|Hard to find official references, tutors, etc

7 Best MATLAB alternatives for Linux
Another alternative to MATLAB is Maxima which is a computer algebra system (CAS) for manipulation of symbolic and numerical expressions including differentiation, integration, Laplace transformation, linear algebraic equations, tensors, etc.
Matlab Alternatives
Another alternative of Matlab is Maxima which was inspired by the legendary Algebra system Macsyma. It is a system used for manipulating numerical expressions such as Taylor series, Laplace transformations, Vectors, Tensors, and Matrices. Very accurate results are provided by using exact floating numbers, fractional values, and integers. The Source Forge file manager...
Source: www.educba.com
10 Best MATLAB Alternatives [For Beginners and Professionals]
Maxima is extracted from Macsyma, a computer algebra system developed in the late 1960s by MIT. Maxima is frequently updated to fix bugs for a more optimized coding experience
4 open source alternatives to MATLAB
Check out Maxima, it is a system for the manipulation of symbolic and numerical expressions, including differentiation, integration, Taylor series, Laplace transforms, ordinary differential equations, systems of linear equations, polynomials, sets, lists, vectors, matrices and tensors.
Source: opensource.com
3 Open Source Alternatives to MATLAB
Maxima, another frequently updated alternative to MATLAB. It's based on Macsyma, a "legendary computer algebra system" developed at MIT in the 1960s, can be compiled on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and is available under GPLv2.

Grapple Reviews

We have no reviews of Grapple yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Maxima seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 27 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Maxima mentions (27)

  • Integral Calculator
    I think the really neat piece of software behind this is maxima (https://maxima.sourceforge.io/), a rather influential computer algebra system of ancient lineage still in use today in more place than you might think. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Rye: Homoiconic dynamic programming language with some new ideas
    In the maxima computer algebra system[1] which was ancestrally based on lisp it has a single quote operator[2] which delays evaluation of something and a "double quote" (which acually two single quotes rather than an actual double quote) operator[3] which asks maxima to evaluate some expression immediately rather than leaving it in symbolic form.[4] [1] https://maxima.sourceforge.io/ [2]... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • True or False
    Use wxmaxima, a free and open-source computer algebra system:. Source: over 2 years ago
  • C++ library for solving EQUATIONS
    There are several options, here is one of them: https://maxima.sourceforge.io. Source: about 3 years ago
  • Do you know computer algebra software capable of managing systems of multiple equations with multiple unknowns and multiple variables?
    You may use maxima cas (https://maxima.sourceforge.io/) to solve symbolic complex problems. Source: over 3 years ago
View more

Grapple mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Grapple yet. Tracking of Grapple recommendations started around Jun 2025.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Maxima and Grapple, you can also consider the following products

MATLAB - A high-level language and interactive environment for numerical computation, visualization, and programming

Looker - Looker makes it easy for analysts to create and curate custom data experiencesโ€”so everyone in the business can explore the data that matters to them, in the context that makes it truly meaningful.

Wolfram Mathematica - Mathematica has characterized the cutting edge in specialized processingโ€”and gave the chief calculation environment to a large number of pioneers, instructors, understudies, and others around the globe.

Tableau - Tableau can help anyone see and understand their data. Connect to almost any database, drag and drop to create visualizations, and share with a click.

GNU Octave - GNU Octave is a programming language for scientific computing.

Microsoft Power BI - BI visualization and reporting for desktop, web or mobile