Open-source MATLAB alternatives

JupyterLab is an extensible environment for interactive and reproducible computing, built on the Jupyter Notebook and its architecture. It is the next-generation user interface for Project Jupyter, offering the familiar building blocks of the classic notebook, such as notebooks, a terminal, a text editor, a file browser and rich outputs, in a more flexible interface.

It can be extended with npm packages that use its public APIs. Prebuilt extensions are distributed through PyPI, conda and other package managers, while source extensions can be installed directly from npm with an extra build step. Extensions can be discovered through the jupyterlab-extension topic on GitHub.

JupyterLab is written in TypeScript, released under the BSD-3-Clause license, and installed with conda, mamba or pip. The project notes that JupyterLab 3 reached end of maintenance in May 2024, with critical fixes backported until the end of that year, and encourages upgrading to JupyterLab 4. Documentation is hosted on ReadTheDocs.

Jupyter Notebook is a web-based notebook environment for interactive computing. Users write code in cells, run it, and see the results next to explanatory text in the same document, which makes it a common choice for data exploration, teaching and documenting analysis.

The project is language-agnostic: it grew out of the IPython notebook, which was split into language-neutral and Python-specific parts in 2015. The current Notebook v7 is built on JupyterLab components for the frontend and the Jupyter Server for the Python backend. Classic Notebook v6 is still maintained for fixes only, and extensions written for older versions are not compatible with v7.

The code is released under the BSD-3-Clause license. The maintainers support the two most recent major versions, Notebook v7 and Classic Notebook v6, and recommend moving off version 5. New features are directed at v7, and contributors are encouraged to build them as Jupyter Server or JupyterLab extensions so they work across Jupyter's interfaces.

Spyder is an integrated development environment for scientific Python. It is written in Python with Qt and developed by the Spyder Project Contributors. The program is aimed at scientists, engineers and data analysts who combine code editing, running scripts and inspecting results in one window.

The repository topics point to ties with the Anaconda distribution and WinPython, and to the Language Server Protocol for editor intelligence. The README offers a Binder link so people can try the latest version in a browser, and notes that some source files and icons carry different authorship or licenses recorded in NOTICE.txt. Widely known parts of the IDE include an editor, an IPython console, a variable explorer and a debugger.

Spyder is released under the MIT license and has been developed since 2009. It is a good fit for people who prefer a MATLAB-style workspace for Python data work, rather than a general-purpose editor, and the project website provides downloads and documentation.

RStudio is an integrated development environment for the R programming language, developed by Posit. It gathers the tools needed for working in R into one customizable workbench that includes the console, terminal, source editor, plots, environment, history, help, files and packages panes.

The editor offers syntax highlighting and code completion, and code can be run straight from the editor by line, selection or file. RStudio supports writing reproducible documents and reports with Quarto and R Markdown, plus Sweave and TeX documents. Optional AI features include GitHub Copilot completions, Posit AI Pass Next Edit Suggestions and the Posit Assistant.

RStudio runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, with a community-maintained FreeBSD port. It can also be run as a server so that several users can open the IDE in a web browser. The README states that it is licensed under AGPLv3, and the source is written mostly in Java.