Some of these packages have an astonishing array of statistical tools; they vary rather dramatically in ease of use, cost, and graphics. (Updated October 28, 2026)
30 day trial. $9.99/month or $79.99/year.
Listing added: July 2026
This is one of the few Mac packages designed for survey research in the social, behavioral, and health sciences, and it’s truly Mac-native in every way. Quanta does the usual regression, t-tests, descriptives and exploration, scales and reliability measures, along with multivariate and nonparametric tests, SEM and CFA, and survey weights. The writers say they test every statistic against R, lavaan, NIST reference datasets, and SPSS, and include a validation record with the app. Imports from Stata 13 or higher, spreadsheets, SPSS.
Results are APA 7-formatted and editable, when exported to PDF or Word (RTF is supported).
This is a subscription app, but it only “phones home” for validation; everything is local.
For our limited test, we opened the General Social Survey’s 2,348-case, 1,064-variable interview dataset, which has many pitfalls for the incautious. This dataset exposed some flaws in JASP, which the writers quickly fixed, and also some in Quanta, which the writers fixed even more quickly (within an hour). It took a few seconds to load in Quanta, which is quite fast. Running a two-sample t-test worked well; the software automatically figured out when the standard deviations were different for the two groups, and used the Welch's test instead of Student's. It also ran a Bayes test.
The controls are easy to work with, and the reports were easy enough to read - in our very limited use so far. It's nice to be able to type in the first few letters of a variable name in a long dropdown and have it highlighted, a benefit of being Mac-native. Indeed, a lot of the oddities one finds in Linux-centric and Windows-centric software were pleasantly absent. (More to come—a full test is planned.)
30 day trial. $9.99/month or $79.99/year
Listing added: July 2026
Qualitative analysis, transcribed on-Mac; codebook-driven coding with definitions and memos, themes, quote bank, and append-only audit trail. It suggests codes from your codebook but leaves application to you. (More to come—a full test is planned.)
14 day trial. $15/month or $129/year
Listing added: July 2026
Another Mac program which also works on the Web and iPad, ReliCheck’s MM Studio runs locally (except for subscription checks). It provides quantitative analysis and qualitative theme analysis, joint displays with numbers and narrative together, a rigor dashboard to flag problems before publication, field collection via iPad, and a survey strength index. Exports APA-style tables to Word or PDF. One license covers the Mac app, iPad, and Web space. (More to come—a full test is planned.)
Price: $10
OS X 10.14+ (M-series OK)
Last update 8/2025 • Listing update 7/2026
Acastat handles up to 100,000 cases and 100 variables, depending on system memory. It does frequencies (with chi-square goodness of fit), lists, descriptives (by subgroups), diagnostic accuracy measures, crosstabs, t-tests, one-way ANOVA, correlations, regression, logistic regression, and appraisal analysis. There’s a real estate module for tax assessments, and a setup to try to create charts from inferred data in summary statistics.
The software seems easy to figure out and learn, providing most of the statistics that most people use day to day, and some that one has to pay extra for from SPSS. We did not test Acastat's accuracy. (Mac App Store version)
Listing updated: 7/2026
Price: $6 (direct or via Mac App Store); iPad version, $2
M-series compatible
StatCalc does the most common, basic tests: comparing means and proportions, showing frequencies and descriptives, doing weighted means, chi-squares, goodness of fit, and such. The Decision Tools module explores price elasticity of demand, queuing theory, constant dollars, and decision tables.
It is very easy to use, fast, and cheap — and continuously maintained. There is an iPad version.
GraphPad Prism - Prism ReviewPrice: personal subscription, $520/year; $142/year student, $260/year academic
Listing updated: 7/2026; last Mac code update, 2/2026
GraphPad Software [(800) 388-4723, 1-858-457-3909] sells Prism, a multi-platform package that emphasizes biostatistics for lab work. GraphPad’s founder, Harvey Motulsky, wrote: “We release new versions of GraphPad Prism every 3-4 years, and Mac and Windows development are done nearly simultaneously.”
GraphPad’s Prism is a strong platform for exploratory statistics and graphing, with usable graphing software and advanced statistical capabilities. Many graph types and flexible regression curving are built in. For more details, read our GraphPad Prism review.
Sold through Apple Store: $20/quarter (Pro, $130/year); upgrade discounts
Listing updated: January 2021
Wizard 2 and Wizard 2 Pro are surprising packages from Evan Miller (creator of Magic Maps) for quick analysis and visualization. Wizard imports data with stunning speed, and comes up with summaries and graphs. Wizard Pro 2 Review.
One of those clever new features is being able to capture properly formatted data from sources as varied as SPSS and HTML — you can feed in a web page and get a table back. This is hard to do, and most software cannot do it, even web software. Wizard 2 also adds a QuickLook feature for SPSS data files, so you can preview databases from the Finder.
Other key updates are larger graphics in the interface, a new Correlate module, new importers, and optimization for Apple’s M chips. The software has gone from a one-time-only price to subscriptions—$20/quarter or $50/year, with Wizard 2 Pro at $130/year. Evan promised that the original Wizard and Wizard Pro will continue to be supported, and will work on M-based computers. Documents for the two versions will be interchangeable. That means users can decide whether to upgrade and join the subscription treadmill, or stay where they are now.
Wizard / Wizard ProSold through Apple Store: $80 (Wizard) and $200 (Wizard Pro)
Listing updated: January 2021 (software still under development despite Wizard 2 release)
Wizard and Wizard Pro — not to be confused with Wizard 2 and Wizard 2 Pro — are surprising packages from Evan Miller (creator of Magic Maps) which is meant for quick analysis and visualization, without a tortured interface. Wizard imports data with stunning speed, and comes up with summaries (including appropriate graphs) instantly. We tested it with large databases, including the General Social Survey, and results were practically instantaneous. Wizard Pro supports Stata dictionary (.dct) and some SPSS command files (.sps), surprising features indeed! It also imports from Numbers, SAS, Excel, and even Microsoft Access — something that’s otherwise hard to do on a Mac.
Wizard is set up to instantly provide summary statistics and charts on large numbers of variables, and also does instant correlations and multiple regressions. It's a discoverable program that delivers a level of “pleasant uniqueness” we haven’t seen in a long time.
There is a Pivot interface for producing numeric summaries and saving them as their own tables, á la Minitab. Pivot functions include count, sum, mean, standard deviation, variance, min/max, and percentiles; tables appear or change instantly, and are far easier to modify than, say, in Excel. There is support for frequency weights, optional display of odds ratios, and various other improvements.
Wizard has full date support, Excel exports, numerous tests (Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis, 2-sample and N-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Negative Binomial, Cox Proportional Hazards), double-precision storage for numeric data, and custom delimiters in imported text files. Following versions continue to increase the scope and quality of the program, on a regular and rapid basis. (Wizard Pro site) Wizard Pro Preview.
StatPlusPricing: $195 commercial, $89 student, $119 academic; bulk rates exist
Listing updated: July 2026; software may or may not still be actively developed
StatPlus uses Excel or Numbers to hold its data, which is convenient and saves them a lot of programming. It loads quickly, provides statistics, and manipulates data. The analyses menu has easily understood categories, and underneath those are submenus with the actual operations. It’s easy to learn, yet has statistical methods that are not normally provided by easy-to-learn software, including one, two, and three way ANOVAs, GLM models, and many other analyses. The Help system is fully developed, in a standard Mac format. Cleverly, StatPlus launches Excel or Numbers automatically when you start it up.
MegaStatRequires Excel; works on Intel, PPC, Windows
Listing updated July 2026
MegaStat is an Excel plugin maintained by J. B. Orris and distributed by McGraw-Hill. MegaStat can deal with stepwise regressions, large factorials, time series/forecasting, descriptives, frequencies, nonparametrics, QPC sharts, and numerous hypothesis tests.
While MegaStat has good power, it is a bit slow, and you need to subscribe to download it, which may require buying a textbook. We were unable to find it recently, and it may not work on Macs any more. Back in 2017, we tested MegaStat’s output to find that it was identical, to six decimal points, with that of Stata.
Pricing: Numerous versions and options.
Listing updated: November 2024
XLSTAT, sold by Pearson, runs inside Excel but does its own calculations. Information about it is unclear at this time.
Stata Starts at $160 per year with an educational discount.
Listing updated 10-2026
Stata has frequent updates for its releases on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Their price is far lower than SPSS, even if you ignore SPSS’ extra module pricing. Stata's Mac support has been excellent. (See our Stata statistical software review.)
Stata has a macro language, a syntax language, a matrix language, a massive collection of user-contributed modules, Python integration, a spreadsheet for data manipulation, an advanced variable editor, copy and paste to word processors (without formatting), and extreme depth and breadth in statistical functions. Graphing is quite advanced.
Stata generates web pages with mixed text, graphs, and such, and supports Markdown and dynamic documents; it can generate Word, Excel, or PDF files, and has built in versioning. It is probably the only statistics software you will ever need.
Listing updated: July 2026
Gauss is widely used, but let’s let its developers, Aptech Systems, 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 ... 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 is considered the high-end statistics package for economic research. Here's a good third party resource for Gauss.”
The last time we checked the web site, we were unable to discover pricing; it’s one of those “fill out this form and we will contact you” pricing deals.
Requires Mathematica. $97-$170, students $47/$87
Listing 10-2026, last software update 2023
An add-on package for Mathematica made by MathStatica Pty. Ltd. It has an arbitrary-precision numeric engine for accuracy in iterative processes. It is sold as mathStatica Basic (bundled with the book Mathematical Statistics with Mathematica) and as mathStatica Gold.
SPSS (IBM)Pricing is by subscription ($99+/month), modules start at $79
Grad and Student Packs start at around $70 for one year.
Listing updated: 2024
See our starting guide to using SPSS statistical software and our review
SPSS was the industry standard when IBM bought it, jacked up the price, and made it a subscription. Many features need pricey add-ons. The user interface is slow and uses Java.
SPSS Mac easily exchanges data, syntax, and output files with the Windows version, and with most older versions (even those which can’t deal with long variable names). The output file format changed a few years ago, possibly because PSPP was able to read them.
Changes have been incremental since version 11. The software is prettier but slower than Stata—easier to use but far more expensive. Free alternatives that use SPSS data files include JASP, Jamovi, and PSPP (old SPSS clone).
Stat-Ease Design-ExpertPrice: $1,325/year (academic discounts available)
Listing updated November 2024; software was current at the time.
With Design-Expert software, “you can not only screen for vital factors, but also locate ideal process settings for top performance and discover optimal product formulations. Easily view response surfaces from all angles with rotatable 3D plots. Set flags and explore contours on interactive 2D graphs; and use the numerical optimization function to find maximum desirability for dozens of responses simultaneously. Handy for DOE!
This is not software for those who only vaguely remember some high school or college statistics; it’s for a relatively sophisticated audience. That said, it can make some difficult decisions easier, as the blurb above promises. You can adjust many aspects of the software through the preferences, including just about type of type size, other than the little explanations in the boxes (e.g., in the illustration above, where it says “Design for 2 to 21 factors...”) which is quite small.
Once installed, Design-Expert reloads quickly, bringing the user to a choice of using a wizard, which is fairly thorough in its descriptions; creating a new design in a more traditional way; or opening a saved design (using the native Mac dialogue box). The program uses the Mac menus and feels native in every way, including responsiveness; preferences are in the right place.
This graphing program computes ANOVAs, including repeated measures ANOVAs. See its listing on the Graphing page. An add-on for Mathematica is available.
GRASSConfigurations Available: Mac, Linux, Windows
Price: Free (and open source)
Current Version: 7.8.5 / 8.0 Preview
Listing updated 10-3-2021
Last software update, 12-21-2020
Michael Barton pointed out that GRASS is used for geographic resources data management, image processing, graphics production, spatial modelling, and visualization of many types of data. It is an official project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.
Originally developed by the Army as a tool for land management and environmental planning, GRASS is a powerful utility with a wide range of applications in many different areas of scientific research. GRASS is currently used in academic, government, and commercial settings. Attributes are managed in a SQL-based DBMS.
GRASS 6 added a new topological 2D/3D vector engine and support for vector network analysis. A new display manager has been implemented. The NVIZ visualization tool was enhanced to display 3D vector data and voxel volumes. Messages are partially translated with support for FreeType fonts, including multibyte Asian characters. New LOCATIONs can be auto-generated by EPSG code number. GRASS is integrated with GDAL/OGR libraries to support an extensive range of raster and vector formats, including OGC-conformal Simple Features.
Quantum GISConfigurations Available: Mac, Linux, Windows
Current version: 3.20
Price: Free (and open source)
Signed for newer Mac versions
Listing updated 10-3-2021; last release, 9-10-2021
Quantum GIS is a somewhat less powerful but easy to use GIS package for Mac, Linux, and Windows. It is also an Open Source Geospatial Foundation project, and it supports numerous vector, raster, and database formats and functions.
Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) for geographic dataConfigurations Available: Mac (under X11), Linux, UNIX, OS/2, Windows [requires Cygwin or VirtualBox for full function]
Current Version: 6.2.1 (released June 2021)
Price: Free (and open source)
Listing updated 10-3-2021
Generic Mapping Tools, or GMT, is an open source collection of many tools for manipulating geographic and Cartesian data sets (including filtering, trend fitting, gridding, projecting, etc.) and producing Encapsulated PostScript File (EPS) illustrations ranging from simple x-y plots via contour maps to artificially illuminated surfaces and 3-D perspective views. A MATLAB extension is available.
gretl does time series and other statistics; see “other software,” below.
Price:
$100, Lite version $10
Listing updated 10/26; software updated 2020
Spectraworks’ kSpectra Toolkit is “a set of programs for advanced spectral analysis of univariate or multivariate time series arising in many of the physical sciences, ranging from electrical engineering and physics to geophysics and oceanography, as well as biomedical sciences. The toolkit contains procedures for estimating the spectrum of a time series, decomposing the time series into trends, oscillatory components, and noise, and reconstructing the contributions of selected components of the time series,” according to the web site.
Dennis Kahlbaum wrote: “makes time series analysis relatively easy via GUI and built-in functions/methods.”
We may have to move this to the “dead software” page soon.
Price: free-$25
Listing last updated: 1-2-2017
Makes pretty timelines. Available in the Mac App Store.
Price:
$100, available in the Mac App Store, Lite version $10; volume discounts
Listing updated 2-18-2020; software updated 2020
Published by Spectraworks, kSpectra Toolkit is “a set of programs for advanced spectral analysis of univariate or multivariate time series arising in many of the physical sciences, ranging from electrical engineering and physics to geophysics and oceanography, as well as biomedical sciences. The toolkit contains procedures for estimating the spectrum of a time series, decomposing the time series into trends, oscillatory components, and noise, and reconstructing the contributions of selected components of the time series,” according to the web site.
Dennis Kahlbaum wrote: “makes time series analysis relatively easy via GUI and built-in functions/methods.”
Statistical analysis (particularly time series analysis) can also be done using general-purpose mathematical software (especially with optional or standard plugins) such as:
Configurations available: MacOS X, Windows
Price: free
Listing updated 10-3-2021
Multimedia product designed to teach college-level statistics (with emphasis on DataDesk).
The site point sout that ActivStats Tools are based on the ActivStats statistics e-book, which includes t-tests, chi squares, and F tests; mean and regression boostraps; and randomization tests to do inferences. “These tools provide built-in datasets, but can also be used with any tab-delimited text data file for which the first row holds variable names.” Distributed by DataDesk.
Configurations OS X 10.9 or newer, “optimized for Big Sur”
Current Version: 6
Price: Free basic version; ranges from Advanced ($129) to Ultimate ($1,990) with $35 student version and educational pricing
Listing updated 10-3-2021; software last updated Feburary 2021 to fix Big Sur bugs. Last major update, 2019.
Knowledge Miner’s data mining tool can now stand on its own, without requiring Excel. It can build predictive and descriptive models — “explicit and complexity minimized mathematical models,” with the ability to self-select inputs and show their importance. It has three languages — English, Spanish, and German.
Since Insights is now standalone, it’s able to run as full 64-bit software with parallel processing, boosting speed dramatically. Excel support is optional, for importing directly from Excel 2011 or 2016. Models can be exported in various formats.
The $129 Advanced version forecasts complex time processes without models, automatically runs simulations or forecasts real-time data (storing up to 5 steps ahead — the Ultimate version goes up to 120), exports models in generic form, can run up to 100 inputs with 50,000 samples, and supports up to 100 forecasting steps.
The Professional edition also does cost-sensitive modeling (including ROC and cost curve plots), also exports models in Objective-C and AppleScript, can run up to 2,000 inputs, with one million samples, and has unlimited forecasting steps. Ultimate adds self-organization modeling of interdependent, complex systems, can export systems of equation in Excel, and can handle 25,000 potential inputs.
The company’s own description:
INSIGHTS is original 64-bit parallel software for building predictive models from data, automatically, by evolutionary, self-organizing modelling approaches. Taking observational data that describes a problem, system, or process, the software constructs a working mathematical model... its AI-powered, self-organizing, modeling algorithms allow users to easily extract new and useful knowledge to support decision-making. ... Users in nearly any field can employ the easy-to-use software to analyze noisy data sets and build powerful models, which can be used to help to gain new insights into complex phenomena, predict future behavior, simulate "what-if" questions, and identify methods of controlling processes.
The software promises to hide the processes of model development, dimension reduction, variable selection, noise filtering, and model validation, self-organizing linear or nonlinear, static or dynamic regression models, to generate the equation that best describes the data. It also checks to see if the final model “reflects a valid relationship or if it just models noise.” It can create models for Status Quo or What-If problems, outputting models and model ensembles in ready-to-use Excel, Python, Matlab, AppleScript, or Objective-C code.
Version: 15
Price:
$499 (commercial),
$
179 (academic subscription; $349 perpetual),
$
99 (student one year subscription)
Listing last updated: 10-3-2021 (prices not checked)
Stat/Transfer can translate to and from most common statistical formats. It works surprisingly well, though you should check to make sure it can make the exact transitions you need. Version 15 brings support for Catalina and Stata 16.
This software is available from Marley Watkins at http://edpsychassociates.com/Watkins3.html (Thanks, Tricia Jones). It’s still kept up to date (when we last looked in 2024). Samples include:
(See free and open-source Mac statistics software.)
Didn’t find what you wanted? Try graphing / visualization (sometimes with statistics built in) and The Dead Zone
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