Which Stats Package is the Most Popular



I’ve often wondered which stats package is the most popular around the world. As most stats packages are owned by private companies, there is effectively no publically available information to help answer the question. One indirect way to address the issue is to tabulate the number of hits each company’s website gets. Using information from google’s AdPlanner, Compete, and Alexa, I created a table that lists the “popularity” of each stats package’s website. If we can infer website popularity with software popularity, then this information may help answer the question.

As can be seen in the Table below, Mathematica, with 1,100,000 unique visitors per month, may be considered to be the most popular stats package, followed by Matlab and SAS. For whatever reason, data for SPSS is not available via AdPlanner (do they opt out?), so one has to estimate using Compete data, which is based on US visits only. As SPSS is a US company, I suspect ranking it just below Statisca is about right, although the Alexa World Rank suggests it should be just above Stata. 
Table 1. Comprehensive Stats Packages and Corresponding Site Popularity Metics

Package

URL

AdPlanner

Compete

Alexa Rank

Mathematica

wolfram.com

1,100,000

309,073

7,494

SAS

sas.com

570,000

112,650

13,705

Matlab

mathworks.com

750,000

108,054

9,335

R

r-project.org

240,000

45,768

39,347

Statistica

statsoft.com

160,000

38,147

85,995

SPSS

spss.com

n/a

28,289

58,198

Minitab

minitab.com

85,000

22,172

146,970

Stata

stata.com

92,000

21,716

99,901

JMP

jmp.com

39,000

10,797

346,126

Systat

systat.com

Lack data

2,535

1,100,294

NCSS

ncss.com

Lack data

1,478

2,309,000

Notes: AdPlanner = Unique worldwide visitors per month; Compete = unique US visitors per month; Alexa Rank = based on a combination of average daily visitors (worldwide) to the site and page views on the site over the past 3 months; all data were obtained on May 20, 2011.
Rounding out the bottom are Systat and NCSS, which are very significantly less popular than the other packages. In some sense, I find this unfortunate, as both of these packages are not that much less useful or useable than their competitors. In some respects, they are on par or even better.
It will be interesting to keep an eye on R, the only freeware package included in the analysis. Will it one day capture the majority of the stats package market? Years ago, I thought it would, but now I seriously doubt it. I suppose that could be a topic for a future blog entry.
≈ Gilles