12 Free Open source Statistical Analysis software as SPSS alternatives
SPSS is a proprietary statistical analysis software acquired by IBM in 2009. It offers statisticians, researchers, and students with advanced statistical analysis functions integrated within the program. SPSS also provides seamless integration with big data.
SPSS is not free and it's not cheap, though it does not work well on Linux systems as it does on Windows, so here we will provide a list of open-source free SPSS alternatives.
We have an updated version of this post with more statistical packages for 2024, you can check it here.
Hazem Abbas
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Free statistical analysis packages
1- JASP
JASP is considered one of the strongest competitors for SPSS, It has a user-friendly interface, supports many data formats, and provides Frequentist and Bayesian analysis.
JASP is available for Windows, Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat, and any distro that supports Flatpak) and macOS (Sierra and later). JASP is also available to run in within the web browser by using rollApp platform but with limited features.
Supported file formats for JASP: .sav, .txt, .csv, .ods, and of course the .jasp format.
University of Amsterdam
2- Jamovi
Jamovi is a free lightweight statistical analysis package, it comes with seamless integration with the R language and complete spreadsheet editing options. Jamovi is another open-source alternative for SPSS but with a fancy easy-to-use interface and smooth learning curve for students and beginners.
Jamovi offers installable executable packages for Windows, macOS, Linux (flatpak package), and ChromeOS (flatpak package).
3- Gnu PSPP
GNU PSPP has been the official GUN open-source alternative for SPSS for years, It provides similar features to SPSS but with support for ODFs (Open Document Formats) like OpenOffice, LibreOffice. It has extensions for independent spreadsheet programs like Gnumeric.
GNU PSPP support for over 1 billion cases & over 1 billion variables. It provides a compatible syntax to SPSS, a terminal users-interface and GUI interface.
GNU PSPP supports many languages in its user-interface, and it's available for Windows, Linux & macOS.
4- Sofa Statistics
Sofa Statistics is an open-source lightweight statistical package for Windows, Linux & macOS. Sofa provides powerful database support for multiple engines include SQLServer, MySQL (MariaDB), PostgreSQL, SQLite, and Microsoft Access.
Though it does not support NoSQL databases, it supports tab-separated values (TSV), comma-separated values (CSV), Excel files, OpenOffice Calc and Gnumeric files, and reads the Google spreadsheets online files.
5- ASCEND
ASCEND is a small open-source package to solve small to very large mathematical models. It can solve systems of non-linear equations, linear and nonlinear optimization problems, and dynamic systems expressed in the form of differential/algebraic equations.
ASCEND provides installable packages for Windows, macOS, and Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu).
6- Gretl
Gretl is a free libre statistical package for Windows, Linux, & macOS. It provides a simple UI, complete R integration, and has a powerful integrated scripting language (Hansl) that allows developers to extend its functionalities.
Gretl is written in C and comes with features that support advanced analysis like parallelization, data exchange with R, GNU Octave, Python, Ox and Sata.
Supported file formats: Excel files, tab-separated values (TSV), comma-separated values (CSV), Gnumeric and Open Document worksheets (OpenOffice/ LibreOffice files) and SPSS files.
Language-Specific alternatives
R language
R programming language is an open-source scripting environment for statistical computing and analysis. It's widely used by data scientists, data engineers, data miners, and statisticians. Here we are listing some open source projects that provide R with graphical user-interface, editors & IDE functionalities.
7- RStudio
RStudio is a free IDE (integrated development environment) for R. RStudio is shipped with many features to provide the productive workflow, like a package manager, history manager, logger, customizable user-interface, scripts manager, auto-complete functions, code editor, code highlighting, file browser and built-in session manager.
RStudio is released as an open-source project under Affero General Public License v3. It supports Windows, Linux & macOS.
8- BlueSky Statistics
BlueSky Statistics is a rich analytic workbench for R programming language. It comes in different editions: a free open-source full-featured edition (AGPL 3.0), a commercial desktop edition and a commercial server edition.
BlueSky statistics has a simple graphical user interface, several modules to ease the workflow while creating and using statistical programs, powerful R integration with automatic R script syntax generation, and runs R commands, scripts.
BlueSky supports exporting to HTML, PDF and many data formats, It offers a command editor to build and execute R commands, custom output viewer and a diagram designer.
9 - RKWard
RKWard is an open-source interface for R statistical language from KDE desktop. It has a powerful spreadsheet editor, code editor, plot and graphs viewer, workspaces browser, and R packages management similar to RStudio. It supports multiple data files formats including SPSS, Sata & CSV.
RKWard does not work only on Linux (KDE) desktops, but it works on Windows and macOS as well. Here is a quick video interview about RKWard
10- Deducer
Deducer is a lightweight open-source GUI (Graphical User Interface) for the R language, that works for Windows, macOS & Linux.
It's an easy-to-use alternative to SPSS, and it's easy to learn as well. In the following video you can watch an introductory tour of Deducer
11- Rodeo (Python Statistical Analysis IDE)
Rodeo is an open-source statistical IDE for Python language. It's the RStudio equivalent for Python statistical libraries, and capabilities. It has a similar interface to RSudio and similar functionalities as well. However, it has not been updated for 3 years.
Rodeo supports Windows, Linux, and macOS.
12 - Juno IDE (Julia language IDE)
Julia is an open-source high-level general-purpose programming language. However, it comes with features that put it ahead in statistical & mathematical analysis. Juno IDE is an Atom-based IDE for Julia language, it combines the Atom IDE features with a data analysis aware user-interface very similar to RStudio and Rodeo.
The Julia programming language has many data-science ready packages including data manipulation, mathematics, and BigData ready packages. It supports also using packages from Python, R, C/Fortran, C++, and Java.
Conclusion
We have listed here the most used open-source statistical packages as free alternatives to IBM SPSS. In case we missed something, please send us an email and we will add it to this evergreen list.
