Why Matlab in 2025, instead of Julia etc.?
Giulio Prisco
on 20 Jul 2025
Latest activity Reply by Walter Roberson
on 30 Jul 2025
I'm planning to start a personal scientific software project. I used to be familiar with Matlab (quite some time ago), so Matlab would be my first choice. But I keep hearing that Matlab is old stuff and I should use Julia or something like that. I wouldn't find learning Julia difficult, so familiarity with Matlab is not an important factor. Neither is cost, because I can afford a home license for Matlab, Simulink and a few toolboxes. So I'm thinking. Please give me your input! Why should I use Matlab in 2025 instead of alternatives?
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Julia will never become unusable for nearly a month because the servers went down. I'm looking for alternatives myself after their negligence nearly set back my dissertation progress. That said, Julia libraries are very underdeveloped, so unless you're interested in directly contributing to Julia, you're probably better off with Python for most things.
Much of the Mathworks ecosystem went down on May 19 2025, due to a ransomware attack. Important parts of it were brought back online on May 27 2025; it took a few more days to bring aspects of it online.
The downtime was not "nearly a month"; it was less than 2 weeks for anything except a couple of lingering issues.
It was 2 and a half weeks to full restoration, and over a week before any communication from the company. There still hasn't been any apology or formal acknowledgement outside of the status page. No indication that any process or organizational changes have been made. Those "lingering issues", like access to the documentation and answers, caused major disruption to a lot of people. I have no confidence in Mathworks anymore, and will definitely push my students toward Python where possible.
Answers was brought back on May 27 2025 (so the 8th or 9th day) -- though if I recall correctly, the Run feature took another couple of days.
And also no word AFAIK on any compromised customer data.
I have never been a fan of the documentation being online by default (since release 2022a?), network licenses, or completely online environments. That paranoia saved me from the worst effects of the Mathworks servers being down, but certainly not everyone can be so lucky. Local installations are still the way to go, if you license allows it.
This is an excellent question. MATLAB is also my first choice of language, but that argument is a getting tougher and tougher to make. Every so often I get curious Julia, but what always puts me off is the lack of a single-point installation. Core Julia doesn't do a lot of things, such as plotting, so you are always going out to some server to pull down code rather than just installing what you need up front. For many years I have argued that MATLAB is your best desert island language: given electrical power (solar panels, coconuts, etc.), you can code without Internet access. Recent changes to the documentation weaken that argument somewhat, but the essential point remains. I want to spend my time thinking about the problem at hand, not muddling through various packages because the base language does not do very much (looking at you Python) or browsing Stack Overflow for "How do I do X with Y?".
Having said all that, people don't like paying for software. The academic world is largely sheltered from this, and large companies have figured out that their technical staff's time is more valuable than licensing costs; individuals and small-to-intermediate size groups find themselves in a lurch. I get a lot of pushback against teaching students MATLAB instead of a "free" language, and in the fact of looming budget cuts, license fees are something people point to very quickly.
Mathworks should be more clear about what the "personal" license is for. It kind of sounds like no one but you can ever look at the results of your work (code, plots, etc.).
I'm quite happy to pay for things that help save my time, as long as I can afford it.
"Mathworks should be more clear about what the 'personal' license is for. It kind of sounds like no one but you can ever look at the results of your work (code, plots, etc.)." Totally agree.
@Giulio Prisco I agree that time is money, and for my part the MATLAB license is a worthwhile investment. My experience is that is much easier make someone a competent MATLAB user than any other language. The difficulty is that not everyone agrees with this notion, or perhaps has a very different idea of what competency means.
The refinement level of MATLAB is way above Julia.
The IDE, the debugging, the documentation, the pletora of funcitons.
Anotehr advantage is MATLAB Coder.
Yet Julia allows more contrl on the code and in many case much more efficient code.
With enough work dedicated, its refinement also will be better.
So I think in the long run MATLAB will have to improve its ability to have more low level control on code in order to generate faster execution.
I'm trying to contact Matlab support to find out what exactly is allowed or not allowed with a Home license, but the automatic answers are not too helpful and I've been unable to find a way to contact a human. Will keep trying. Suggestions?
Human from MathWorks here. Which areas of Home license usage are you unclear on?
Hi Mike, thank you for replying. I’m considering purchasing a Home license for Matlab, Simulink, and a few toolboxes for a personal hobby research project. I’m unaffiliated and retired, so this is not professional work. Also, it is not commercial work. However, I plan to develop some code and share it with others via Matlab or Github. I also plan to share some results. Since I’m unaffiliated, it would be a waste of time to try and publish results in science journals or arXiv. But I would share code and results on my website, Matlab forums and Github. I guess this must allowed under the Home license, but I prefer to check. Is what I say above allowed under the Home license? I also have two more questions: Does Matlab (Home license) watermark images or wordmark code? Would I be able to download updates to the products I purchased? Thank you very much Giulio Prisco I also sent the above text as a support case: Case Number: 07965548
I had almost identical questions regarding the Home License. TMW said that publishing to personal blogs, Github, etc. "provided the code is not part of a commercial product or offered as a paid service."
Less clear is the Home License policy on collborative projects such as "Citizen Science":
"However, collaborative projects, even if unpaid, can be interpreted as organizational use. For clarity, please review the Program Offering Guide linked below: https://www.mathworks.com/help//pdf_doc/offering/offering.pdf"
The Program Offering Guide does not provide any clarity which is why I asked in the first place.
Python, Julia, etc. are much less polished viz. IDEs, documentation, and don't have Simulink equivalents. But, they have active user communities where sharing is the norm and where Matlab takes it on the chin for being paid software.
TMW should be a lot clearer on what is and isn't cricket with the Home License.
Thank you! I guess this depends on what is considered "a scientific paper." I guess a paper in Nature is a scientific paper and an Instagram post is not a scientific paper, but there are many shades of grey in between. I'll take a good look at the Home license.
Note that you can use the MATLAB Home license for personal projects. It is probably also fine to publish the resulting code to File Exchange.
However, it would not be within the Home license to publish a scientific paper about the results.
As for the possibility of creating a YouTube channel... it would probably be okay (not completely sure) providing that the channel was not monitized... but YouTube is something that really should be checked with Mathworks first.
Not that I know of, but I want to use Simuling only because that toolbox requires it.
You said you may want to use Simulink. Does Julia has a package that is just like Simulink?
In China, there is a company that developed a MATLAB-like software by building a wrapper around Julia, and of course, they also have software packages similar to Simulink.
Very interesting! Posted a comment.
That toolbox is not an official MATLAB product indeed, but the developers have been developing it for quite some time and even written a book about it, so I guess it works well enough. If not, it will be interesting to find out!
You can get a free 30-days MATLAB trial version to see if the software fits your needs.
The Toolbox you linked to is not an official MATLAB product - so there is no support and no guarantee that it works out correctly.
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