General, commercial statistics software for Macintosh computers (Macs)
Updated 1-26-2010
All of these packages provide some descriptive statistics; some provide an astonishing array of statistical tools. Also see:
- Free Mac statistics software
- Graphing and visualization software (including packages that do statistical routines, e.g. Aabel)
- Data mining, econometric software, general math, and specialty statistics.
- Dead software.
DeltaGraph
DeltaGraph does nonlinear and linear regression as well as a number of other routines. See our graphing page for details.
Fathom
Configurations Available: Universal Binary
Current Version: 2.1
Listing updated: 12/2009
Price: starts at $129
Program last updated 2006 or earlier
Fathom Dynamic Statistics is a software package designed for teaching basic statistics and data visualization in secondary and undergraduate classes. (800) 995-MATH; +1-510-595-7000; fax: (800) 541-2442, +1-510-595-7040
Gauss
Configurations available: Mac-Intel (unsure if PPC is supported)
Current version: 6.0
Listing updated: 4/2008
Gauss is a widely used, “big-time” package...but let’s let Aptech Systems, the developers, say it:
The GAUSS Mathematical and Statistical System is a fast matrix programming language widely used by scientists, engineers, statisticians, biometricians, econometricians, and financial analysts. Designed for computationally intensive tasks, the GAUSS system is ideally suited for the researcher who does not have the time required to develop programs in C or FORTRAN but finds that most statistical or mathematical "packages" are not flexible or powerful enough to perform complicated analysis or to work on large problems.
Joel West, the creator of this site, wrote: “Gauss was never available on Macs before, and is considered the high-end statistics package for economic research. Here's a good third party resource for Gauss.”
GraphPad Prism - Prism Review
Configurations: Universal Binary (Cocoa)
Current Version: 5.0c (released Jan 2010)
Price: $595 (lower with substantial academic discounts)
Listing updated: 1/2010
GraphPad Software [(800) 388-4723, +1-858-457-3909] sells Prism, a multi-platform package that emphasizes biostatistics for laboratory work. GraphPad’s CEO and founder, Harvey Motulsky, wrote: “We release new versions of GraphPad Prism every 3-4 years, and Mac and Windows development are done nearly simultaneously. Prism 5 for Mac was released nearly a year after the Windows version because we did a complete rewrite to recreate it in Cocoa to make it a fully modern Mac program. We plan to keep Mac and Windows versions in synch as we develop future versions.”
GraphPad’s Prism is a strong platform for exploratory statistics and graphing, providing the usability of graphing software with many advanced statistical capabilities. Numerous graph types are available along with flexible regression curving. For more details, read our GraphPad Prism review.
GraphPad StatMate
Current version: 2.0
Compatibility: OS 8.6-9.2; OSX 10.1 and up; Windows
Price:$95 (commercial price); $75 (academic/nonprofit price); discounts apply for extra licenses
Listing updated: 6/2008
GraphPad Software, Inc. [(800) 388-4723, +1-858-457-3909; fax: +1-858-457-8141] sells several packages. StatMate (2.0, OS8/X, PPC, $95) provides estimates of needed sample sizes: “quickly calculate the power of an experiment to detect various hypothetical differences. Its wizard-based format leads you through the necessary steps to determine the tradeoffs in terms of risks and costs.”
GraphPad InStat
Current version: 3.1
Compatibility: OS 8.6-9.2; OSX 10.1 and up; Windows
Price:$150 (commercial price); $125 (academic/nonprofit price); discounts apply for extra licenses
Listing updated: 6/2008
GraphPad Software, Inc. [(800) 388-4723, +1-858-457-3909; fax: +1-858-457-8141] sells several packages.
InStat 3 (OS8/X, PPC, $150) is an low-cost, easy-to use biostatistics software package. GraphPad wrote that the program was designed to guide users who are not necessarily full-time, dedicated statisticians through the process of gathering and analyzing data, at a reasonable cost. InStat also provides a unique analysis checklist to ensure that “your data have not violated any assumptions of the test, and that you have picked a test that matches your experimental design and really answers the question you had in mind.”
A quick look through a demonstration copy showed us that InStat is helpful for beginners, providing a guide that goes step by step as you use actual data. The program itself seems fairly easy to use, and is designed in wizard fashion, better thought out than most. It is fast and responsive, and provides easy access to common needs — providing comparisons of means (through numerous methods), regression and correlation (linear and nonparametric, but not stepwise as far as I can tell so far), and analyzing contingency tables through Chi-square, Fisher's, and other tests. Data can be entered as ra data, averaged, x and y, two rows and two columns, or larger contingency tables. As you specify your goal (compare means/medians, regression/correlation, analyze contingency table), the program provides an example or two of the possible purpose of the analysis. This is a surprisingly good program for both inexperienced people and those who know a lot of statistics but don't use their knowledge often enough to jump into a more complex and costly program.
With version 3.1, InStat can handle 10,000 cases and 52 variables; the Help system has been better integrated into Windows and the Mac; long calculations get a progress window, and you can cancel them.
JMP
Configurations: Universal Binary; past versions were 68000, PPC, etc.
Current Version: 8
$1,495 ; with educational discount, $595.
Listing updated: 6/10/2009
SAS Institute’s JMP started out (on the Mac Plus) as a pure data visualization program with no syntax, but is now a credible competitor to Stata and SPSS, complete with a syntax language, journaling, and comprehensive list of statistics and experimental design tools.
Jay Lee wrote that JMP started life as “John's Mac Project,” hence “JMP.” You can use it for item response theory analysis, which is unavailable on any other Mac stats program; and can select single, double, and triple parameter models for dichotomously scored items.
A student version (JMP IN) is also sold. Full demos are available. JMP 7 was the first Universal Binary version; it removed table size limits.
JMP starts almost instantly, and is very responsive; it feels more like a Mac program than many other stats packages. There is no comparison of the Mac-friendliness of JMP to Stata and SPSS. Importing a large data file from Excel was almost instantaneous, with no inane dialogue boxes or strange assumptions. The file was correctly analyzed and imported, with variable types being correctly assigned automatically and names taken exactly from the Excel columns.
The writers have kept the Mac-friendliness alive, with a set of Mac-only preferences, blindingly fast performance, instant response times, and no hint that this program is published by a company that only makes a single Mac-compatible product. It is, to say the least, amazing. Try to open a spreadsheet with four variables and 30,000 entries, and while PASW (the software formerly known as SPSS) is busily digesting the idea, JMP has already opened it and displayed descriptive statistics... in an easily copied spreadsheet. Run the same descriptives in PASW, and you get a table with a bunch of dots — because the columns are the wrong size!
Numeric output of JMP in our tests (which used 30,000 randomly generated 15-digit numbers) was identical in PASW, Stata, JMP, and the free Megastat. In this group, JMP was by far the fastest (finished before we could look at the stopwatch), followed closely by PASW and Stata (around 1 second each), and then by Megastat, which at 3 seconds was still quite reasonable.
Regressions in JMP were absurdly fast — instantaneous, in fact. That includes multiple multiple, high-resolution plots we could copy directly into Photoshop, summary of fit, analysis of variance, parameter estimates, residual plots, actual by predicted, etc. Again, we’re using 30,000 cases. What’s more, from the output window, we could not just copy and paste tables or plots, but could even change parameters or run additional tests from convenient submenus within the output.
All of the packages have their friends and advantages. Stata, which is beloved by professional statisticians and mathematicians for its incredible flexibility and range (due largely to a massive library of contributed routines), is the hardest of the bunch to use. PASW also now can run R routines, but is, by far, the most expensive if you count the near-annual upgrade fees and the need to buy additional packages. MegaStat is free and easy to use; but it has no syntax and requires Excel (2004 or 2008, your choice) and doesn’t go as far as the “pro” packages.
It’s hard to beat JMP’s stunning and flexible graphics, its solid package of statistics, its helpful help which goes into both statistical issues and program issues, and its sheer responsiveness — not to mention the ease of taking its output and putting it into other software. For graphics, you can even have it use Photoshop file format (PSD) when copying.
We’ll be posting more details, and some screen shots, soon.
Kaleidagraph
This graphing program will compute ANOVAs, including repeated measures ANOVAs, which aabel doesn't appear to compute. Synergy is committed to the Mac market. See their main listing on the Graphing page.
mathStatica
Current Version: 1.0
Configurations Available: requires Mathematica; claims to be PPC and MacTel compatible
Listing updated: 5-25-06
mathStatica is an add-on package for Mathematica which provides algebraic and symbolic solution to statistical problems. Thus, it is supported in the same configurations as Mathematica for the Macintosh. It is published by MathStatica Pty. Ltd.
The software is sold as mathStatica Basic (bundled with the associated book, Mathematical Statistics with Mathematica) and as mathStatica Gold ($69 upgrade from mathStatica Basic).
MegaStat
Current Version: 11.1
Configurations Available: requires Excel; works on Intel, PPC, Windows
Listing updated: 5-18-09
Cost: included with textbooks; download
MegaStat is maintained by J. B. Orris, Butler University, and distributed by McGraw-Hill, which explains why you may not have heard of it. The software uses Excel only for “data entry, data transformation, printing, and file management,” but avoids using Excel’s disreputable math tools.
MegaStat can deal with stepwise regressions, large factorials, time series/forecasting, descriptives, frequencies, nonparametrics, QPC sharts, and numerous hypothesis tests. In short, MegaStat packs all the power most people will ever need into a relatively inexpensive, easy to use package. The down side is that it’s moderately slow, has no scripting language, and requires Excel; and you may need to buy a textbook to get it, though J.B. Orris is considering a shareware or commercial version. On the Mac, some of the buttons and dialogues are hidden by formatting problems.
We have tested MegaStat’s output and in our tests, it was identical to six decimal points with that of Stata.
The software has evolved from J.B. Orris’ Microstat; the current version is written in VisualBasic as an Excel plugin, though a standalone version is planned for the distant future.
PASW
See SPSS, below
SPSS - PASW (closer look at SPSS)
Current version: 18 (Universal Binary), Snow Leopard compatible, Intel-only; final PowerPC version was 16; final Classic version was 12; final 68000 version was 6 (4 if you wanted to actually do something with it).
Pricing: numerous options. some time-limited; add-on modules require their own upgrades
Listing updated: 9/21/09
SPSS is an industry-standard general-purpose statistics package with its own news group, comp.soft-sys.spss; see also Raynald Levesque’s SPSS Tools. Many features require expensive add-ons which must all be updated separately. New revisions come roughly once a year.
SPSS is written with multiple platforms in mind; the underlying code is shared, with a Java interface. SPSS is capable of nearly anything its Windows counterpart is and can easily exchange data and syntax files. SPSS 17 and PASW 18 cannot read any older output files but the data and syntax files are fully compatible with older and Windows versions (even those which can’t deal with long variable names). There are some bugs noted in our SPSS 16 and SPSS 17 review and some annoyances in our PASW 18 review.
SPSS 10.08a can run under OS X on non-Intel machines if you:
- Right-click (or control-click) on the SPSS 10 program package (not the alias) and select "Show Package Contents"
- Drag out the SPSS 10 for Macintosh alias from the package
- Close the folder and use the alias you just dragged out of the SPSS package to start the program.
SPSS 17 and PASW 18 are Intel-only but has many bug fixes and a syntax editor with autocompletion and code coloring that reports errors in the same window that you type into. Some of the other extensive new features include support for R graphics and scripts, multithreading for greater speed, control over Office exports, and ... the full list is in our SPSS for Mac review. (See our SPSS 17 review)
Stata (closer look at Stata)
Configurations Available: Mac OS X, 680x0; PowerPC native, LinuxPPC, MacTel/Universal
Pricing: Several versions depending on power, with Intercooled starting at $500 with hefty educational discount
Current Version: 11.0 (as of July 28, 2009)
Listing updated: July 2009
Stata is distributed by Stata Corporation. Web pages are provided for the Mac OS and Linux products.
Stata is a simply amazing company for statistics. They quickly got a Universal version out, and they do updates about every two weeks, with automatic updates; they do simultaneous releases across platforms; and they don't demand that you buy extra modules after spending a packet on the main program, even though their price is considerably lower than that of SPSS. Stata's Mac support deserves serious consideration when making such an expensive and long-term decision.
More details are in our in-depth Stata 9 statistical software review. Stata 10 is similar but has more statistical features and better graphing. Stata 10 adds improvements to multiple imputation, GMM, competing-risks regression, multivariate time series, factor variables, panel data and mixed models, and marginal analysis; full documentation in PDF format; editable syntax with highlighting; a variables manager; live data view; and more.
Stata 11 is, again, similar to prior versions, with new features listed as “multiple imputation, factor variables, marginal analysis, competing-risks regression, state-space models, dynamic-factor models, multiple fonts in graphs, random number generators, multivariate tests,” and more. A new syntax editor was added but only for Windows users. Of more significance to Mac users is an overhaul of the variables system, with a new Variables Manager to ease changing variable names, storage types, formats, labels, and notes. A new data editor allows sorting, filters, snapshots, and more.
StatCrunch
StatCrunch is fairly unique - a full-fledged statistics program that is freely available for web-based use, currently without advertisements, with a $5 per user fee for use on your own server, or $5/six months. It has the usual range of basic statistics, from t-tests to regression to ANOVA and nonparametric tests, with a wide range of graphs also available, and works from Excel or text files. StatCrunch, though free, will also store your data within reason; it seems to work fine with Safari. For those with low budgets or infrequent needs, StatCrunch's fairly easy to use interface and price are extremely attractive (it also makes sharing data easy).