MATLAB Reviews

Summary: I really enjoy using MATLAB at university I would recommend to other engineering students. It’s better than python.

Positive: I like everything about it it’s so easy to write scripts if your every stuck you can use the help command and learn more about certain functions.

Negative: I like everything I can’t think of anything to change.

Summary: I recommend MatLab to anyone, for general engineering needs. However, there are definite programs out there, such as python, which can do the same if not more. It is very easy to navigate and has many available add-ones such as the engineering toolkit which I love for RF design. However, if you are willing to step away from the mainstream and try open source programs, then you’ll find plenty of software which can provide the same capabilities with less or no cost.

Positive: MatLab is an extraordinary software for solving complex equations, or creating/visualizing engineering concepts. I have used it for personal income calculators, PLC design, General graphing purposes etc. The search function to get help on functions is incredibly easy, and the user base is so large, you can always find an answer.

Negative: Since it is based on matrices, sometimes programming can be a little different than other softwares where you don’t always start at 0. This is just something a programmer needs to be aware of. However, this is very negligible and easy to overcome.

The price and requirements for frequent renewals to download new features is a bit frustrating.

Summary: Any engineer whose work involves the computation of any algebraic equations should know how to use and have a Matlab license. Matlab itself and its toolbox help a lot in engineering and computation.

Positive: When it comes to computing, algebra is involved in an electrical circuit. MatLab is the first thing that comes to mind because,
-Powerful yet easy to use.
-Specifically, design to compute engineering equation.
-Can interpret the result in diagrams and figures .

Negative: When computing a huge amount of calculation in one go, Mathlab lacks in speed and sometimes lags.
Secondly, the cost is too high, as a student, I could never buy it. But now I have bought it for my personal use as it helps a lot in my work.

Summary: I used to use this in my Matlab class for designing the graph for equations and visualize them. This is a very reputed software in the community.

Positive: Easy to use
Very reputed in the community
Pretty basic Ui
Best for plotting graphs and equations
User friendly

Negative: No cons. using since my 2nd year of engineering and found no issues.

Summary: MATLAB is a great tool which can be used for data analysis, computation or visualization. It can also be used for simulations and modeling systems. It provides a high level language for utilizing powerful features.

Positive: Good user interface.
High Performance.
Large number of available functions.
Great for data visualization.
Available across platforms.
Easy to use debugging tools.

Negative: Resource intensive - slow to load.
License price is high.

Summary: There's a vast range of functions and the ability of plotting graphs is amazing. I use it pretty much daily for my research, my teaching, and even in some personal day-to-day life. From hard core coding of thousands of lines, to simple data post-processing and analysis, to creating visuals for presentations and journal articles, to creating animations for my lectures, to track my personal household expenses or calculate things for house projects. I have only praise for this great piece of software.

Positive: MATLAB's help documentation both built-in into the software itself and online are amazing. There are very detailed, clear, illustrated and have plenty of example you can choose from. Users can learn and apply methods directly from the online help. Definitions of functions are very clear. This make it a no-brainer when it comes to get started with new function and new functionalities.
There's a vast range of functions and the ability of plotting graphs is amazing. I use it pretty much daily for my research, my teaching, and even in some personal day-to-day life.

Some of the best features I've used over the years include:
- Very polished GUI: You have a nice interactive and customizable workspace and variable viewer in the main window. The editor has really become more modern in past years with nice features like auto-completion and variable highlighting.
- Big set of libraries: There seems to be an ever expanding universe of toolboxes that do low-level tasks for you so you can get to the real science.
- Powerful Graphing capability: There is a steep learning curve to learn to graph by code, but it is pretty powerful and easy once you get the hang of it.
- Simulink: I don’t use it much, but there are some capabilities you do not have with other programming languages.

Negative: MATLAB is a very bulky software which requires a lot of time to install and open, especially if you install a lot of its components.

Because MATLAB is a not open source, it is not always obvious how it computes things.

MATLAB can be expensive. If you're lucky enough to be a student you can get a very cheap license. Otherwise, module can add up VERY rapidly to the bill. I am lucky that my institution has a site license for all university member to use even on their personal machines.

I also find that MATLAB is lacking as a modern programming language. MathWorks claims MATLAB is a comprehensive language, but it lacks some features of a modern programming language. I won’t go into much detail here, but if you go far enough with MATLAB, eventually you will find yourself frustrated with some shortcomings that are not present in other languages (like python). If you're a developer/programmer used to other languages, you may feel uneasy or frustrated.

Summary: As a whole Matlab software as well the Matlab language is easy to learn and is of greater use while studying communications/computing science.

Positive: High-level data analysis and visualization can be done using this software.
It provides various tools for different tasks like mathematical modeling, communications projects, etc.

Negative: Its cost is high and even the software is of much weight. Needs high configurations to use.

Summary: MATLAB was the software that made mathematical computing and programming cool and easy for anyone to pickup. The entire academic community relies on MATLAB even to this day but it is very rapidly being replaced by cheap/free and portable alternatives like python and octave.

Positive: - Literally has a built-in dictionary. You will hardly need to google anything related to MATLAB
- Has an ever increasing number of libraries and features that keep it relevant across ages.

Negative: - Prohibitively expensive for students and takes up a lot of computational resources on the PC.

Summary: It's the best software if you're in an industry that needs to make sure calculations are accurate and can be double-checked. It's possible to create functions and object controllers within MATLAB, and to document your code too. But it's a pretty heavyweight software and if you don't need that many advanced capabilities you can get by with alternatives.

Positive: When I first started using MATLAB in college a few years ago, the main alternatives were Octave and R. Nowadays, it seems like Jupyter Notebook can handle some of the same graphing functionalities, but isn't nearly as robust. My first internship at a Fortune 500 company also used MATLAB, because of how the program and its language were designed with scientific and mathematical purposes in mind. This means it can handle with very few errors advanced numerical analysis, modeling, and equation solving, without needing to bring in other software products or risk compatibility issues.
Picking up the MATLAB language is not hard if you are familiar with Python. You just need to remember that most things are based on arrays in MATLAB.

Negative: The high level of specificity (for scientific and mathematical purposes) offered by MATLAB also unfortunately makes it a little clunky for other purposes. For example, if you just wanted to run a short monte-carlo simulation, you could within MATLAB, but it's more CPU and memory intensive than creating a script in Python.

Summary: I basically used MATLAB for some mathematical computations and also some image processing methods like PCA, Clustering, etc.

Positive: For me the most helpful features were:
- Documentation (solution to almost all the problems)
- Import (importing and defining variables without writing a code)
- Curve Fitting

Negative: - Its cost is high.
- Takes a lot of space in my RAM.