The best open source alternative to Mathematica is SageMath. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 50 alternatives to Mathematica and many of them is open source so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternatives to Mathematica are R (programming language), GNU Octave, Jupyter and Maxima.
SageMath is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more.
It can calculate many things symbolically and combines many other software packages.
Its free and sounds capable
R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be consider.
R is really only useful for statistics, and not even mathematical statistics.
Octave is a computer program for performing numerical computations which is mostly compatible with MATLAB . It is part of the GNU Project. It is free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Octave needs programming language skills, it doesn't support well symbolic math.
The Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, machine learning and much...
It can run python inline and do markup work all in one system. Can be worked via network and connected to via browser (including through phone) and set up to run distributed computing systems easily. Additionally it's open source and server side runs on most major operating systems.
Maxima 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, and sets, lists, vectors, matrices, and tensors.
It's free. It is also smaller, so starts up fast. Runs on Android devices as well. Lot's of functionality, including symbolic and numerical operations. Symbolic operations are not as extensive as Mathematica, but adequate for many operations. Numeric operations are considerably slower than Mathematica, and numerically oriented apps such as R, Matlab or Octave.
I'm a theoretical physicist and I can do almost al the math I need with Mxima
It does support Symbolic math, but Matlab or Octave not
Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an...
It's an easy, powerful, really fast language which feels like a mix of Python and Ruby but runs like C. It comes with many mathematical functions, has a good stack of libraries for graphs (including Matplotlib as PyPlot) and can be used with the Jupyter Notebook. Still not at version 1.0, but already a great tool!
Combines advanced editing, analysis, debugging, and profiling functionalities with data exploration, execution, and visualization capabilities. Expandable using its powerful plugin system and API, providing flexibility for custom integrations.
It is a development environment for Python, not a symbolic math language/software.
Scilab is free and open source software for numerical computation providing a powerful computing environment for engineering and scientific applications. Scilab includes hundreds of mathematical functions.
wxMaxima is a document based interface for the computer algebra system Maxima. wxMaxima provides menus and dialogs for many common maxima commands, autocompletion, inline plots and simple animations.
SymPy is a Python library for symbolic computation. The stated goals of the library are to become a full-featured computer algebra system and to keep a simple code base to promote extensibility and comprehensibility.
Calcpad is a lightweight mathematical platform for cloud and desktop. It parses simple text scripts and converts them into professional Html reports. Supports complex numbers, variables, functions, graphing, units and numerical methods.
Mathics is a general purpose computer algebra system (CAS) and designed to be a free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica. It's programmable using a Mathematica like language and uses a web interface for user interaction.
United States
New Zealand
Germany
EU
France
Bulgaria
Austria
Sage supports symbolic maths through Maxima