Libraries. Inertia. The IDE is actually far more polished than Spyder. It makes things easier for non-programmers with many wizards, and excellent help files. The toolboxes are uniformly fairly high quality. I should mention again the help files. Matlab documentation is comprehensive and far better than any of its competitors.<p>There are many research institutions and workplaces where the cost of the tool isn&#x27;t really thought about at all. In fact, the cost of Matlab and toolbox fees is a small fraction of a senior scientist&#x2F;engineer&#x27;s total compensation.<p>The main competitor is Python. However, using a general purpose programming language is often too hard for non-programming oriented scientists. They are not able to compile a Python package on Windows, never mind actually package and distribute their work to colleagues. On Windows, if the package isn&#x27;t in one of the distributions like Anaconda, it may as well not exist.