Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Qalculate! VS GNU Octave

Compare Qalculate! VS GNU Octave and see what are their differences

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Qalculate! logo Qalculate!

Qalculate! is a multiplatform multi-purpose desktop calculator.

GNU Octave logo GNU Octave

GNU Octave is a programming language for scientific computing.
  • Qalculate! Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-11
  • GNU Octave Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-08-07

Qalculate! features and specs

  • Versatility
    Qalculate! supports a wide range of calculations, including basic arithmetic, algebra, calculus, and complex mathematical functions, making it suitable for various users from students to professionals.
  • Extensive Unit Conversions
    It provides extensive support for unit conversions across different measurement systems, which is very useful for scientific and engineering computations.
  • Currency Conversion
    The tool includes real-time currency conversion capabilities, allowing users to perform financial calculations with current exchange rates.
  • Customizability
    Users can define their own functions and variables, offering a high degree of customization to cater to specific needs.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    Qalculate! features an intuitive and user-friendly interface, making it accessible even to those who are not highly technically proficient.
  • Cross-Platform
    It is available on multiple operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux, ensuring accessibility for a wide user base.
  • Free and Open Source
    Being open-source and free to use, it offers a cost-effective solution compared to commercial software without compromising on features.

Possible disadvantages of Qalculate!

  • Learning Curve
    Despite its user-friendly interface, the vast array of features and functionalities may present a steep learning curve for new users.
  • Documentation
    While there is documentation available, it may not be as comprehensive or as user-friendly as some users might require, making it challenging to fully utilize all features.
  • Performance
    For very large or complex calculations, the performance might not be as robust or fast as some specialized or commercial tools.
  • GUI Limitations
    The graphical user interface (GUI) might have limitations in presenting very complex calculations or notations as compared to some professional-grade mathematical software.
  • Lack of Community Support
    Being a niche tool, it may not have as large of a community for support and resources as more popular commercial alternatives.

GNU Octave features and specs

  • Free and Open Source
    GNU Octave is completely free to use and distribute. Its source code is available for anyone to inspect, modify, and enhance, providing transparency and community-driven improvements.
  • MATLAB Compatibility
    Octave aims to be mostly compatible with MATLAB, meaning that many scripts and functions written for MATLAB can run in Octave with little or no modification.
  • Extensive Documentation
    Octave has comprehensive documentation, tutorials, and a vast array of user-contributed content, easing the learning curve for new users.
  • Flexible Integration
    Octave can interface with various programming languages such as C, C++, Fortran, and Python, making it versatile for different types of projects and workflows.
  • Powerful Plotting Capabilities
    Octave includes features for generating high-quality plots and visualizations, which are essential for data analysis and presentation.

Possible disadvantages of GNU Octave

  • Performance
    In some cases, Octave may be slower than MATLAB, especially for highly optimized or proprietary algorithms that MATLAB handles more efficiently.
  • GUI and Toolboxes
    While Octave offers a graphical user interface, it is not as polished as MATLAB's. Additionally, the range and quality of toolboxes available in Octave can be more limited compared to MATLAB's extensive and well-supported toolboxes.
  • Community Support
    Although there is a supportive community around Octave, the user base and available support resources are smaller compared to MATLAB's extensive network of forums, user groups, and customer support.
  • Learning Curve for Advanced Features
    While basic operations are straightforward, mastering advanced features and customizations in Octave can require a deeper understanding of its architecture and available functions.
  • Less Industry Adoption
    MATLAB is widely used in industry for research, engineering, and analytics. Octave, being an open-source alternative, lacks the same level of commercial adoption and institutional support, which can be a drawback in professional settings.

Qalculate! videos

DSP Raspberry Pi 4 Qalculate! Install

GNU Octave videos

GNU Octave Ep. 1.5: What's different compared to MatLab!

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Qalculate! and GNU Octave)
Calculators
100 100%
0% 0
Technical Computing
0 0%
100% 100
Advanced Calculator
100 100%
0% 0
Numerical Computation
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Qalculate! and GNU Octave

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GNU Octave Reviews

7 Best MATLAB alternatives for Linux
FreeMAT is a free and open-source software for numerical computation. It is used for rapid engineering, scientific prototyping, and data processing. It is similar to MATLAB and GNU Octave and supports its various functions.
Matlab Alternatives
Scilab is an open-source similar to the implementation of Matlab. The approximation techniques known as Scientific Computing is used to solve numerical problems. To achieve this, the team of Scilab developers made use of Solvers and algorithms to build the algebraic libraries. Scilab is one of the major alternatives to Matlab along with GNU Octave.
Source: www.educba.com
10 Best MATLAB Alternatives [For Beginners and Professionals]
GNU Octave an open-source alternative to MATLAB. It is interactive and powerful featuring everything you need in one place.
4 open source alternatives to MATLAB
GNU Octave may be the best-known alternative to MATLAB. In active development for almost three decades, Octave runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac—and is packaged for most major distributions. If you're looking for a project that is as close to the actual MATLAB language as possible, Octave may be a good fit for you; it strives for exact compatibility, so many of your projects...
Source: opensource.com
3 Open Source Alternatives to MATLAB
GNU Octave may be the best-known alternatives to MATLAB. In active development for almost three decades, Octave runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux alike, and is packaged for most major distributions. If you're looking for a project that is as close to the actual MATLAB language as possible, Octave may be a good fit for you; it strives for exact compatibility, so many of your...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Qalculate! seems to be a lot more popular than GNU Octave. While we know about 34 links to Qalculate!, we've tracked only 1 mention of GNU Octave. 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.

Qalculate! mentions (34)

  • Show HN: Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator
    Https://qalculate.github.io can do this also for as long as I've used it (only a couple years to be fair). I've got it on my phone, my laptop, even my server with the qalc command. Super convenient, supports everything from unit conversion to uncertainty tracking The histogram is neat, I don't think qalc has that. On the other hand, it took 8 seconds to calculate the default (exceedingly trivial) example. Is that... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • Frink
    Interesting project. I use command line Qalculate [1] for this (has a very similar feature set to Frink AFAICT) and Pint [2] for scripting. I feel like unit-aware calculators are hugely underused by physical engineers, it's the same idea and benefit as type safety but they're virtually unheard of, everyone just uses excel. Having guaranteed dimensional correctness is so great for the early design stage, it makes... - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • "A calculator app? Anyone could make that."
    I use qalculate, it behaves well enough for my needs. https://qalculate.github.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Students, what features would you like to see on Windows 12?
    1) a scientific calculator with history and variables with a UI similar to https://sourceforge.net/projects/alt1-calculator/ that also can do units like https://qalculate.github.io/ 2) a tiny text chat direct message program that is similarly as easily accessible at Atl1 3) a minimalist dock of as many instances you would like similar to https://punklabs.com/rocketdock, and like where WIN opens the start menu, WIN... Source: over 1 year ago
  • Paint on Windows is getting layers and transparency support
    Qalculate is my go-to for cross platform calculator that is useful and is not limited to the most basic +-*/ operations. https://qalculate.github.io/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
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GNU Octave mentions (1)

  • everyday I get more certain that Algerian universities sucks...
    As for Matlab, I think you'll be just fine with using GNU Octave. Source: about 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Qalculate! and GNU Octave, you can also consider the following products

SpeedCrunch - SpeedCrunch. SpeedCrunch is a high-precision scientific calculator featuring a fast, keyboard-driven user interface. It is free and open-source software, licensed under the GPL. Download Documentation Donate .

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

Numi App - Numi is a beautiful text calculator for Mac.

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

Event Viewer - Get help, support, and tutorials for Windows products—Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7, and Windows 10 Mobile.

Scilab - Scilab Official Website. Enter your search in the box aboveAbout ScilabScilab is free and open source software for numerical . Thanks for downloading Scilab!