Matlab alternatives

Matlab is proprietary tool, and it's license fees are in thousands of dollars. Many open source alternatives exist, which are as good or better than Matlab.

1. Octave: GNU Octave is most popular alternative, and has been in development for more than 30 years. It strives for exact compatibility, so many of your projects developed for MATLAB may run in Octave with no modification necessary. So, if already learned Matlab, you can seamlessly start using Octave. It's front end interface can be chosen to be same as Matlab.

2. Scilab: Best known alternative outside of Octave. It doesn't strive for exact compatibility with Matlab, but is very similar to Matlab

3. Mathematica: It offers features for machine learning, image processing, data mining, etc. It is a superior tool for symbolic mathematics.

4. Python: Python language itself supports a lot of packages which can do all the scientific computing done in Matlab. NumPy is the main package for scientific computing with Python. SymPy is another Python library for symbolic mathematics. It's preferred to use python, as you have to learn python or any other scripting language anyway.