COMSOL Multiphysics Reviews

Summary: I've been using Comsol Multiphysics sporadically throughout the years for my research activity and my student have been also using it on a more regular basis.
It's an exciting platform that can do pretty much everything BUT the mentality of the the company and their approach to customer support are a big negative to me. In addition, the pricing is pretty high (EVEN for academia).

Positive: Comsol allows for creating physics simulations in a large variety of fields (from acoustics, to electromagnetics, to thermal applications, to fluid dynamics, to semiconductor physics, to.... you name them). The overall capabilities of Comsol Mutiphysics are pretty much endless as soon as you have to solve differential equations. Its GUI is really nice and is more intuitive than some other alternatives such as Abaqus.

Negative: At first it can be very intimidating and overwhelming. Deciding what "physics" you want to solve, setting up your first simulation, customizing your equations, calculating specific physical quantities, testing for convergence, ... This is true for most of the specialized software, but because of the multiphysics component, it can be daunting to get started with this particular software suite.

To me, the most negative aspect is the customer support. I've been conducting research in my field for over 15 years and I've used multitude of software, from open source to commercial packages, and Comsol has the worst technical support of them all. Several years ago, I interviewed for a senior application engineer position at Comsol, and I was told by the senior managing engineer who was interviewing me two things that made me reject the offer they made: 1) that the company "does not care about academia because academic license are cheap and do not bring in money" (as opposed to industry) and 2) "Engineers at Comsol are not suppose to help people with their particular technical problems, they are here to refer the customer to online resource that already exist".