Stata alternatives

3 tools to consider instead of Stata, shown against it.

Stata R SAS EViews
Vendor StataCorp LLC The R Foundation SAS Institute Inc. S&P Global
Pricing model Subscription Open source + paid options Quote only Subscription
Free tier No Yes No Yes
Deployment Self-hosted Self-hosted Cloud, Self-hosted Self-hosted
Open source No Yes (GPL-2.0-or-later) No No
Best for Economists, epidemiologists, and social scientists who need reproducible, command-driven statistical analysis. Statisticians, academic researchers, and analytics engineers doing custom statistical modeling and visualization. Regulated enterprises (pharma, banking, government) that need validated, auditable statistical analysis at scale. Economists and financial analysts running time-series forecasting and econometric modeling.
Pricing

Single-user annual or perpetual license by edition (BE/SE/MP); multi-user network and volume licenses priced by quote.

Stata/MP (annual, download) $995.00/year

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Free and open source; no paid tiers for the language itself. Commercial support and hosted environments are sold separately by third parties (e.g. Posit).

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

No published price list; SAS quotes each deal based on modules, users, and deployment (on-prem, cloud, or marketplace pay-as-you-go).

Checked on the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026: no prices are published. Expect to be quoted.

One-time single-user license (new or upgrade) at separate commercial and academic price points; volume licenses for institutions; a limited free Student Version Lite is also offered.

Commercial – New license $2,450
Commercial – Upgrade $925
Academic – New license $700
Academic – Upgrade $380

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features
  • Built-in library of regression and panel-data estimators
  • Survival and time-series analysis
  • Complex survey design and weighting
  • Do-file scripting for reproducible analysis
  • Mata matrix programming language
  • Publication-quality graphics
  • Extensible via user-written commands (SSC archive)
  • Extensive statistical modeling functions (linear/generalized/mixed models)
  • CRAN package ecosystem with 20,000+ packages
  • ggplot2 grammar-of-graphics visualization
  • R Markdown/Quarto for reproducible reports
  • Vectorized data manipulation (base R and tidyverse)
  • Shiny for interactive statistical web apps
  • Interfaces to C/C++/Fortran for performance-critical code
  • SAS/STAT library of statistical procedures
  • SAS Viya cloud-native analytics engine with Python/R APIs
  • Predictive modeling and machine learning
  • Data management, ETL, and governance tooling
  • Regulatory-grade validation and audit documentation
  • Enterprise reporting and business intelligence
  • Role-based access control and model governance
  • Time-series regression and ARIMA/VAR modeling
  • Panel-data and cross-sectional estimation
  • Cointegration and unit-root testing
  • Forecasting with structural and reduced-form models
  • Object-oriented workfiles for reproducible workflows
  • Built-in economic and financial data connections
  • Programming language for custom estimation routines

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