MATLAB has a number of competitors. Commercial competitors include Mathematica, Maple, and IDL. There are also free open source alternatives to MATLAB, in particular GNU Octave, Scilab, FreeMat, Julia, and Sage 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 for Python, and Numeric.js for JavaScript.

GNU Octave stands out as it treats incompatibility with MATLAB as a bug (see GNU Octave#Matlab), therefore it aims to provide a software clone.

ଭେରିଏବଲ୍ସ (Variables)
Easter eggs
Structures
Alternatives