OriginPro

Steep/Vertical learning curve - but sometimes necessary software for various reasons

The vendors claim of 25+ years of service to the scientific community is noble, but is also clearly visible in the software. Whilst providing almost any analysis and graphing option you could ever wish for, the interface and general user experience is very bad. The roots of the software are still visible and since then it seems like any new feature was just added with its own little symbol. Now there are about 100 symbols present in the standard view, some of which are not available/necessary for all tasks. Furthermore, some functionalities are somewhat redundant, and also work only in some cases. All in all, the learning curve is incredibly steep, the documentation features suspiciously many screenshots from Windows XP and tooltips are a rare sight, making it an awful choice for the one task most students will use it for: Drawing a simple diagram to put in a report

If you don't have to use origin for legacy or legal reasons - don't. Upsides: If you need validated software and an option to have a wathertight data-trail for your application (e.g. medical data, blind-experiments...) or your experiment setup comes with a prepared origin-script, I guess it has a place with you.